tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-69127429633683990512016-11-10T08:09:56.005-08:00Sea SongsMarxism and pop dissected; but what else?Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.comBlogger172125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-55170547084525653352013-02-10T22:25:00.000-08:002013-02-10T22:59:21.514-08:00On Swansea City and EnglandI wish there could be an English Swansea City - a club simultaneously rooted in its community and traditions, outside the control of plutocrats <i>and </i>conscious of football in the fullest global and European senses. &nbsp;I wish nothing more in the world. &nbsp;All these things are what I wish for England; they are deep within its history, theoretically possible, never entirely buried. &nbsp;But I keep fearing there cannot be such a club here, and perhaps never could have been at least in any world that actually did exist (though there could have been had the 1980s and beyond been as Bernard Nossiter envisaged them in 1978), that there is something too profound, something too deep-rooted in our history that prevents it.<br /><br />There never was proper democratic ownership of English clubs as still exists in Germany, of course, and never could have been outside that hidden path where we meet ourselves coming back, that road not taken. &nbsp;There never could have been because of the strength and power of the essentially feudal class system in England. &nbsp;While that system remained essentially unreformed and undefeated, whether by socialism or deregulated capitalism, all that could ever replace it was its modern successor, the repackaged feudalism of plutocracy. &nbsp;And so it has been; English football went, as we know, straight from aldermen to billionaires - the feudalism of one world to the feudalism of another - without an intervening period of democracy. &nbsp;It went that way <i>because of England itself</i>, despite, not because of, all the many extraordinary manifestations of creativity that England can take such pride in, but still because of, and not despite, the essential foundation stones of its society, where the new form of feudalism was allowed to take command just when the old one seemed to be on the rack and crumbling.<br /><br />Germany has obviously not been a freakishly stable state with a moment such as 1066 defining all that followed, and 1066 is certainly not the foundation stone of Welsh national identity and social relations today; the Norman invasion was much slower and more haphazard and was much more seriously resisted. &nbsp;This is not, I think, a coincidence. &nbsp;Swansea City can remain locally-owned, with their supporters having a share, and the great clubs of Germany can remain under the control of their supporters, because localism can be democratic in places where 1066 isn't a defining moment (this isn't "Norman yoke" English nationalism, just historical honesty). &nbsp;In places where it is the defining moment, localism can - I fear - only ever be what it was in pre-Hillsborough, pre-Sky English football, a front for outrageous divisions between the clubs' owners and their actual fans, with the latter treated as wholly different and inferior species without any concern for their livelihoods or even their lives. In Wales, without such a deep feudal division between ruling class and mass, it is that much easier for a club to be locally rooted without exploiting, dividing and conquering its fans, because the fans were always much more part of the same culture and the same world as the bosses, the latter much likely to have risen from the ranks of the former (as Swansea's chairman did, and as many old-school English football chairmen never did).<br /><br />You realise, based on this, why so many English people - myself included in many of my previous posts here and elsewhere - consider the products of plutocracy to be almost, accidentally, progressive in context and by comparison. &nbsp;You realise why so many fewer Scots - and, I would suspect albeit in the current absence of relevant sales statistics, Welsh people - want Frank Ocean or Disclosure (note that I am <i>not </i>suggesting for one moment that either of these acts represent Cowellite plutocracy - they are in fact as far as pop gets from it - I am simply pointing out that they are for me and for much of the English Left, along with Motown, a kind of surrogate socialism of desperation). &nbsp;They don't want them because they don't <i>need </i>them; their ancestral culture is not tainted by feudalism to the point where they have to look beyond for anything progressive. &nbsp;I <i>need </i>Frank Ocean and Disclosure like I need oxygen because all I can get from my physical environment is feudalism. &nbsp;English clubs, in some ways, <i>need </i>plutocracy because they could only otherwise be governed by something even worse; small-town feudalism and institutionalised classism against their own fans, as indeed they were for a century. Their environment simply does not contain the potential for a democratic club, combining roots with a sense of 21st Century Europe, such as Swansea City are. &nbsp;When Richard Scudamore, of all people, describes Swansea's management as ideal, he must be ruefully aware of this; he must know the aspects of English history which prevent it from happening here, the aspects which for 40 years have driven the English Left into being pro-Murdoch by default out of a sense of common enemies, a corner we cannot get out of in the way that Swansea can.<br /><br />The other aspects which separate Swansea from the norms of English football are also culturally specific; the club's sense of stability, of slow advance and long-term, uninterrupted endeavour, has to do with the fact that the national myth of the buccaneer, the individual who cares neither for the past nor the future, is simply not embedded in Wales (or indeed Scotland) in the way it is in England. &nbsp;There is much more valuing of order within a gentler capitalism, in part because the idea of "knowing your place" is much less tainted in Wales and Scotland because it can have a progressive meaning, a meaning that can assert working-class pride and openness to the wider world rather than simply being about subservience to a ruling class that hates you - the desire for the internal rules of capitalism to be torn down, as they have been in England in my lifetime, was less potent because localism, maybe even a slight cosiness, could actually be socialist and reasonably equal. &nbsp;There is a sense in which England's immense creativity in popular culture is born out of that national sense of the buccaneer, the people who gave us everything from Motown to grime, that the short-term culture that has isolated English football is born out of the exact same criteria that make England exciting in other fields, that the mass ownership by plutocrats has the same roots (however much of a perversion it has become) as the internationalism that make England's popular culture so fresh and stimulating - that, in short, for there to be an English Swansea City, rather than merely a succession of paler and paler imitations of Tony Pulis's BNP FC, England would have to become less exciting and stimulating in some other fields.<br /><br />There is this niggling, ongoing sense that English football culture is narrow <i>because </i>broader English popular culture is exciting - not least because the latter's instinctive, elemental ties are mainly to the non-football world, which puts English football, as a part of English popular culture, in a deeply problematic position without even intending or wanting or choosing to be. &nbsp;Swansea's outstanding absorption and development of the Spanish-style passing game, their bypassing the usual <i>Sun</i>-friendly list of Big Names and having the sheer chutzpah to get Michael Laudrup to a club that spent most of his playing career routinely drawing 0-0 with a Mansfield or a Rotherham, their sense of ambition and desire to escape the norms of their environment, to not have to do everything through the great power next door but to make their own alliances and their own friendships and their own alignments, has to do with an instinctive <i>political </i>desire to separate themselves from the Anglosphere, to exist outside the domain of England-as-seafaring-global-trader.<br /><br />Politically, the latter idea - driving force not only for Cameron but for people, almost unbelievably, far worse - is simply poison, socially terrifying and economically suicidal (which is why the CBI types that the Tory Right desperately wish could support it mostly don't, much to the headbangers' impotent infuriation). &nbsp;In terms of popular culture, though, it is <i>still </i>- despite everything - a force for inspiration, just when you don't want it to be. &nbsp;There is much to be admired, socially and politically, about the greater European consciousness of many Welsh and Scottish people (could David McAllister becoming Chancellor of Germany be the moment of serendipity that Scotland still hasn't quite reached, the moment it all falls into place, and finally freezes out any chance of England being what I myself am, against my will, a reason why it cannot be?). &nbsp;In terms of football it is, as we know, obviously the only way. &nbsp;But if pretty much everyone in England who understands football knows <i>intellectually </i>that it is the only way, is there something deep <i>emotionally </i>within us - within our popular culture and our working-class consciousness - that stops our football taking that path? &nbsp;If&nbsp;we accept that football can never be divorced from the context of wider popular culture within the working-class consciousness, we can then recognise that high and low, posh and pop, have been less historically divided in Scotland and Wales and that this in itself may lead to a more mature understanding of football - where a European consciousness is not identified, in that very English way, with "toffs in the Albert Hall" and thus with class treason - that history denies the English.<br /><br />And maybe this is the reason why there is still a moment when Avicii or Swedish House Mafia <i>aren't quite enough</i>, when that serendipity and social perfection feels like an imperfect evocation of the human condition and specifically of the problem of England. &nbsp;There is a moment that hits you, just when you wish it didn't, when this almost unimaginably idyllic social democracy of pop (that is what "Don't You Worry Child" is, like nothing in my lifetime), feels <i>incomplete</i>. &nbsp;You want it to be all you need - and maybe it <i>would </i>be all I needed if I were Scottish or Welsh - but eating away at you is a sense that it isn't, that the aggression and brutality and disregard for all established sensibilities of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, that which has conquered English football with the rest of English popular culture, is somehow necessary too. &nbsp;And you hate yourself for it. &nbsp;You wish that "Levels" - shimmering and untouched as if that were not suspicious - was all the pop you needed to be emotionally whole, and that Swansea City could have happened on your own doorstep, with equal and simultaneous longing and sadness. &nbsp;And you realise anew that, just as the IBA and Sky are different from and alien to each other in every conceivable way other than both being different forms of non-democracy, neither paternalism nor plutocracy representing "the people" in the way the Dutch broadcasting system has been able to do, English football - in terms of its actual ownership and control - never really was "the people's game", that it can only be so in Wales because it is only there, and in Scotland, that "the people" in the sense the <i>Mirror </i>was going forward with, as opposed to "the people" <i>The Sun </i>was going forward with when it first purloined that slogan, have <i>ever </i>really been sufficiently socially cohesive and dominant to run a significant institution.<br /><br />And yet there are still moments when I wonder if everything I've written above is a lie, a desperate attempt by an English Leftist marooned in the worst, the least historically promising part of England to live second-hand, just as I might in other moods live second-hand through urban pop. &nbsp;When Swansea fans sing "oh England is full of shit", they can't <i>all </i>really be saying "England is full of plutocrats and Cameronites and Europhobes". &nbsp;Some of them must, I know, be saying "England is full of spongers and blacks and Asians". When a Swansea fan shouts racist abuse at a Norwich player, I don't invoke post-colonialism to say it is somehow more acceptable than if it were the other way round (and they must surely be two of the whitest cities to have ever had Premier League teams); I actually find it much worse, because in my position - and shoot this down as delusional romanticism by any means - you expect so much more, in terms of openness and tolerance, from those who see themselves as socialistic and European-minded from those who loudly and aggressively do not.<br /><br />And yet I know that much of the history of Old Labour is a necessary corrective if your vision of the working class is simply as an anti-racist (let alone "anti-imperialist") vanguard, and I know all too well how much the culture of post-industrial areas has changed and how rapidly the tradition of the autodidact, the self-taught working-class intellectual, has been eroded; the change between the Manics and Stereophonics or Lostprophets, barely a flick of the eyelid apart in age, is so vast and so total that it might in other times have required an entire human lifetime to take effect (I always thought this was a factor in Noel Gallagher having, however buried and however perverted by parochialism and fear, some kind of working-class consciousness that his brother completely lacks; his anger at Liam dedicating "Live Forever" to Diana Spencer was surely, somewhere within, a sign of Noel's having been that much older during the Winter of Discontent and the miners' strike, and indeed the political use of her wedding). &nbsp;I do not, of course, pretend that Swansea City and their fanbase are unaffected by this. &nbsp;But I still think they have something very good and very necessary happening there, and it still breaks my heart that the weight of history prevents it from happening here.<br /><br />I don't want Scottish independence to happen because of pure selfishness and self-interest from my position as a socio-political outcast in my geographical environment. &nbsp;Unlike many of those in England whose politics <i>are </i>based around selfishness and self-interest (and who often, perversely and paradoxically, <i>also </i>oppose Scottish independence when they, unlike me, stand massively to gain from it), I'm honest enough to admit that. &nbsp;But it still fills me with shame. &nbsp;So does only feeling able to live through others, those born to things I wasn't. &nbsp;But honesty still feels to me like the only way, especially when filtered through with sadness and melancholy. &nbsp;Hopefully I've shown it here. &nbsp;Hopefully I've told the truth.Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-8224626578439089492012-12-18T11:37:00.001-08:002012-12-18T11:39:40.283-08:00The sociology of namesWhen two EDL-supporting brothers, born in the 1970s, broke away from the route of a march through the Medway towns and attacked staff in a kebab shop simply for "looking a bit different" - so much for the EDL being any kind of allies of convenience for the anti-Islamist Left - many would have responded to the fact that they were called Wayne and Darren by saying, effectively, "what do you expect"? Many would feel the same way about the fact that two of the people on my patch who have most rapidly sunk into a morass of drink and drug abuse - seemingly waiting for death decades early - are called Jason and Wayne. &nbsp;The complete social discrediting of these names, to the point where nobody would dream of giving them now, tells a significant story about the descent of large parts of a particular generation of a particular social class from the unending social advances and opportunities that their parents envisaged for them when they were born to the morass of isolation and decay that they have fallen into since.<br /><br />Popular given names always reflect whatever other place and time is being romanticised at the time they are given; the current immense popularity of Jack, Harry, Alfie and Charlie reflects a certain romanticisation of a largely imaginary past England, the street urchin and the Cockney wideboy as preferable to the "feral" "chav". &nbsp;By the same token, the popularity of Wayne, Darren, Lee etc. for the working class at a particular moment in history (Jason's origins are of course quite different, but it came to be of the same ilk) reflects the romance and excitement of American affluence and prosperity for parents who had lived through great hardships as children, the idea that once you had your own home (a concept then - crucially, and crucially different from my own lifetime - still couched in socialist terms in Britain) and your own consumer durables nothing was beyond you. &nbsp;I don't think they ever became quite so popular in Scotland, where William seems to have held up better during its wilderness years in England and Brian seems to have lasted longer, but impossible as this is even to imagine now, Wayne and Darren were <i>aspirational </i>names for the English working class in the 1960s, a sign not that you could never go anywhere but that you were going somewhere, away from the slums and, indeed, the Jacks, Harrys, Alfies etc.<br /><br />This is the context in which they make sense - which, unfortunately, only exists in many people's minds today as a prelude to the context in which their pariah status makes sense. &nbsp;When the names were most commonly given, the underclass into which so many of their bearers have sunk didn't yet exist, and would have seemed hard to imagine. Their parents could only foresee decades of advancing opportunities and freedoms for their children; there would have been no assumption that anyone would ever find the idea of university graduates with those names funny. &nbsp;By 1974, of course, the working class's hopes for its future role in society would have outstripped even that; many honestly believed that, by now, they would be in command, would have taken over the very top table. &nbsp;The idea that names that betrayed a child of the working class in the 1960s or 1970s would be, in themselves, almost a badge of shame to live down would have been impossible for their parents to grasp.<br /><br />There is much more to be said about this stuff - about the very fact of Lee Hall's given name, in the context of the consumerist aspirations of much of the working class at the time of his birth in 1966, arguably undermining his view that it was purely Thatcherism and Thatcherism alone that destroyed the old working-class culture, about the fact of Alex Ferguson's sons being called Jason and Darren strengthening <a href="http://in-the-cage.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/alex-ferguson-alternative-history-of.html">the point</a>&nbsp;I made here some time ago about his delusionary concepts of the BBC as permanently Reithian and Sky as "anti-establishment" "rebels". &nbsp;But I think it should be made clear that the discrediting of these names isn't simply a naming trend in isolation; it runs in parallel with the discrediting of the dreams that sustained the working class in this country for the two decades after Suez and Hungary, both the dream of America and the dream of social emancipation here (both underlying subtexts in much of <i>Then Play Long</i>, rendered explicit in a piece like <a href="http://nobilliards.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/roy-orbison-best-of-roy-orbison.html">this</a>). &nbsp;No dreams, as yet, have adequately replaced them.Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-79764797703018085622012-12-14T07:47:00.003-08:002012-12-14T07:48:50.237-08:00Why Weymouth and Portland Borough Council hate and fear the people they purport to representThe explicitly anti-internet rhetoric in said council's Christmas freesheet is all too typical of a basic distrust of the people whose interests it is supposed to defend. &nbsp;This is not coincidental or dreamt up overnight; this is a basic condition of the very existence of that kind of shire elite. &nbsp;As has been discussed at length here before, the self-image of these people is built on a fraudulent assumption that global capitalism isn't really happening to them, and any acknowledgement of the fact that it very much <i>is </i>would destroy the central delusion of their lives, their unearned sense of specialness and difference. &nbsp;The admission of how similar their lives actually are to those of people in cities would be too much for them to bear, because their belief that they're Not Like That - that they have escaped what is in fact carried on the very air and in the very fabric of the economic system that sustains them - is the foundation stone of their existence.<br /><br />But now it has become blatantly obvious that most people round here actually very much <i>like </i>global capitalism <i>and are not ashamed of the fact </i>- they are quite happy to play its games and have their lives defined by its major players, and somewhere like this, without a meaningful socialist tradition, who can blame them? &nbsp;You have a straight choice here between global capitalism at its most deregulated in living memory and Rotarian parochialism, "the club tie and the firm handshake" - and faced with such a choice, Marx knew well that the former is infinitely more progressive. &nbsp;And this is where the local elite's anger and paranoia comes in. &nbsp;Knowing that what it thinks the area is has nothing to do with how most of its people choose to live, it resorts to coercion and emotional blackmail - saying "forget the internet" is really saying "forget global capitalism", but it's being said by people who read newspapers and vote for or represent parties which regard even the 1945-79 British model as akin to communism. So they go on, pretending that they exist somehow outside global capitalism when in fact they need it simply to eat and sleep and breathe, and all they can offer makes tax-dodging monoliths seem like the most open and free-thinking things in the world. &nbsp;Look at that freesheet and you know in five seconds why so many socialists use Amazon, just as you could look at a meeting of the same council in 1967 and know in five seconds why so many socialists supported a singer and a set of entrepreneurs whose politics were, pace Rees-Mogg, "straight John Stuart Mill".<br /><br />If an area such as this cannot find an identity for itself which doesn't involve attacking any kind of broader interrelationship or affinity with the socially "unsafe", can it blame itself if so many choose to isolate themselves from it? &nbsp;If people like me are told that we don't really belong round here because our interests and aspirations are global, it is hardly surprising that our response will be mutual; in saying we don't belong we are, in fact, merely agreeing with our masters. &nbsp;If a culture has to define itself by what it is <i>not</i>, and lacks the self-confidence and self-assurance to survive solely by what it <i>is</i>&nbsp;- if it has to stress the negative so as to strengthen any kind of positive - then it must be waiting for death. &nbsp;It's a sign of profound weakness and insecurity that it cannot simply be proud of what it is, that it has to attack and denounce everyone else.Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-49357593903455716822012-12-06T20:34:00.000-08:002012-12-06T22:11:25.862-08:00Getting things wrong so you can get them right<div>Twelve and a half years ago (I hope that it's not still online and I certainly wouldn't link if it is), I wrote some essentially meaningless and vaguely positive words - on a website that at the time was greatly inspiring and changing the way I saw music and the world - about a really bad and embarrassing 1978-ish Jethro Tull live album. &nbsp;And I may never forget it. &nbsp;The memory of everything about it makes me shudder to this day. &nbsp;The moment it appeared I knew I'd made a grave mistake. &nbsp;But now - at last - I know why I did it.</div><div><br /></div><div>At that moment, certainly for someone like me who'd grown up entirely in that time and had latterly been ensconced almost entirely in the <i>NME</i>-led world, anything to do with progressive rock or folk-rock, let alone both, still residually wasn't - certainly hadn't been at all until very recently - <i>allowed</i>, to the point where even the bad stuff had a misleading exoticism about it&nbsp;(actually, even that isn't the main reason I listened to the songs and wrote the piece; that was personal, and I have no intention of writing about any of it here). &nbsp;We forget now just how powerful the <i>NME </i>consensus was in the twenty years after punk, how much power one set of ideas and one set of gatekeepers could have in one fairly closed-off country (on the Momus newsgroup in 1999, I was astonished that a Swedish contributor could like both Yes and bands who <i>were </i>part of that consensus, little realising that in the US and continental Europe it had long been commonplace), and how much music that is now accepted in the canon was seen as politically suspect, even vaguely fascist (case in point: I only discovered recently the folk-song origins of Saint Etienne's "Like a Motorway"; further case in point, the folk-influenced stuff that is right at the top of the pop charts now that <i>is </i>politically suspect and even vaguely fascist would have been beyond anyone's imagination in the long-shadows-on-county-grounds age). Accordingly, that lack of understanding produced an inability to tell the good from the bad.</div><div><br /></div><div>The internet was a very, very long way from what it is now, and not having heard it from older relatives, I'd still barely heard any of the actual music, just knew <i>about </i>it as a vaguely untouchable piece of the past (I don't think I'd even used Napster yet; I was still on mp3 newsgroup trawling and I hadn't done much of that). &nbsp;We were at such an early stage of assessing the prog and folk-rock legacies - and, arguably, what had happened in and to Britain from 1964-79 (which those genres feel fully part of in a way that the most blatantly proto-Blairite bands, the Frees and Zeps and Purples, somehow and probably misleadingly do not) behind the obvious headlines of devaluation and strikes and emergent monetarism - that it was inevitable that some bad stuff would have excuses made for it on the way. &nbsp;It was an inevitable error on the path to true understanding, a piece of collateral damage that comes with something seeming so weirdly new, after being so forbidden for so long, that it is impossible to fully grasp, as yet, where it went right and where it went wrong.</div><div><br /></div>At this point I cannot help but think - and this is not meant to be any kind of emotional or sensationalist comparison - of the well-documented way some on the British Left once defended the Paedophile Information Exchange. &nbsp;It is clear to me, in the context of the time, why Harriet Harman et al took the stance they did; at a time considerably closer to the pre-1960s world than it is to 2012, we were at a much earlier stage of understanding which things previously considered abhorrent really were abhorrent and which weren't. &nbsp;We were at a much earlier stage of telling unjustified prejudice and superstition from justified disgust and revulsion. Repulsed as they rightly were by the way so many people in that older society had made an instant moral equation between homosexuality and paedophilia, seen them as on the same level and all gay men as potential paedophiles (and, often, that <i>only </i>gay men were potential paedophiles, hence why so much abuse of girls might have fallen through the net more easily and taken longer to come out), they assumed that if those instant reactions to homosexuality could rightly be seen as unfounded prejudice, then so must similar reactions to paedophilia, that if the old world had been wrong on the one count then it <i>must </i>also have been wrong on the other. &nbsp;Millions of people, especially outside the major cities, were still at least half in that world, so - however horrible and misjudged - it is perhaps inevitable that such a false equation would have been made on the Left; we simply weren't far enough out of the old world to be able to tell the difference yet.<br /><div><br /></div><div>It is probably inevitable that such false equations - misguidedly defending the indefensible out of blanket opposition to older prejudices - will be made while those older prejudices are still being shaken off and we can't really understand them yet. &nbsp;It's probably inevitable in every field and every walk of life. &nbsp;In some ways, it's a reassuring sign of my basic humanity that I have such an example in my own past. &nbsp;It doesn't make it any more calming to remember, but writing this has cleared some of the ghosts. &nbsp;And if I didn't think I could do that, I'd never write here at all.</div>Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-13054620001383542152012-12-06T19:37:00.003-08:002012-12-06T19:39:21.862-08:00Top of the Pops, BBC Four and the hierarchy of art formsGoing back through my offairs from BBC Four's early years - when it unashamedly celebrated many of those (Robert Wyatt, John Martyn, Vivian Stanshall, Ivor Cutler, Mark E. Smith, Penman/Morley-era&nbsp;<i>NME</i>) who most joyously and defiantly refuted the semi-feudal structure of popular art and society in England<i>&nbsp;</i>- and comparing them with its current hierarchical separation of documentary classicism and a certain kind of Friday night pop (<i>Paul fucking Carrack</i>) and <i>Top of the Pops </i>reruns is a painful experience which, in many ways, says much about the change from NuLab to ConDem. &nbsp;Whatever other horrible things happened during those years - and there were many, of course; God save us from any kind of sentimentalism of that long period of missed opportunities and money that didn't exist - there was a definite sense that the hierarchy of art forms, the idea that pop must Know Its Place, had been <i>comparatively </i>broken down, or at least that those who would enforce it as an absolute, unswerving, unchangeable rule were marginalised, licking their wounds on the fringes (that joke about selling the <i>Telegraph </i>as if it were the <i>Socialist Worker </i>was real, once).<br /><br />Now the divisions and rules about what each art form can do and what it cannot are being as viciously reinforced as they can be in our present society - which is more viciously than some of us would have imagined, then - and the BBC is powerless because those doing the reinforcing hold the key to its very existence. &nbsp;The <i>Top of the Pops </i>reruns were, from the start, an attempt to render a suspicious product of the Labour years acceptable to those reignited gatekeepers casting their noses over it, to say "look, BBC Four's alright, really, it may once have thrown the barriers down, but now it's put them back up again and this forgettable fluff is all it thinks pop ever was, or ever can be". &nbsp;Contrary to popular myth, most of pop's greatest enemies&nbsp;always rather liked <i>Top of the Pops</i>&nbsp;- because pop's greatest enemies aren't, and never have been, the Thomas Winnings or Peter Hitchenses or John Tyndalls of this world, they are the patters on the back, the extreme centrists, those who love it as long as it is content to play a minor, unobtrusive role. &nbsp;They are <i>The Sunday Times </i>in 1996, praising Status Quo for their changelessness and as a front for demonising the young generally and the global unity of the proletariat in particular. &nbsp;They are Chris Dunkley, nudge-winking at Channel 4 daring to make <i>The Hip Hop Years </i>in 1999 and doing far more to back up the BNP than crude send 'em-backery ever could.<br /><i><br /></i><i>Top of the Pops </i>was perfect for them, because most of the time it reassured them that, in direct contradiction of all the other evidence screaming in their faces, the working class generally (then identified with pop in almost everyone's minds in a way we cannot now imagine) were perfectly happy to play along with a ruling-class agenda. &nbsp;<i>Top of the Pops</i>' very existence was always conditional on most, if not all, of the music in it knowing its place in the Reithian hierarchy of art forms, never challenging the feudal role pop had been ordained. &nbsp;Its constant appearance where Wyatt and Stanshall and Smith once got the serious celebration they had so long deserved is a sign, of a piece with DJ Q or Young Lion's "not on our money" dismissals, of the re-establishment of that hierarchy, that structure, that certainty. &nbsp;Those who regard it as BBC Four's highest priority should be aware that they are, in fact, being used by those who hate pop music and all it has ever done and all it is still doing. &nbsp;This is why the dark shadow that now hangs over it, with editions presented by two of its most familiar faces considered unshowable and a vaguely sleazy, nasty-tasting feel to much of the rest of it, is entirely appropriate. &nbsp;The Cameronite biter bit, and it's all <i>Top of the Pops </i>really deserves in the end.Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-28628858495567372782012-09-21T23:10:00.000-07:002012-09-22T17:09:53.220-07:00Why reviving The Establishment club is a bad ideaI mean, really, for fuck's sake. &nbsp;Keith Allen blokishly beholding himself before blokish George Galloway, this government's ultimate useful idiot. &nbsp;Could there be anything more narrow and insular and <i>depressing</i>?<br /><br />But the fact that the project is cheerled by Victor Lewis-Smith explains almost everything. &nbsp;The whole concept - rooted in an institutionalised and thus meaningless legacy of John &amp; Paul and Pete &amp; Dud as secular gods (and thus the one thing they'd have hated the most, and felt the greatest desire to break down) - has a fundamental problem with people not born to its exponents' comparative privilege if they can't fit into an instantly convenient narrative. &nbsp;For the likes of Galloway, Muslims who oppose Islamism - which in his degraded mind he (along with Seumas Milne and other morally and intellectually lost Stalinists) has identified as some kind of "anti-imperialist" vanguard - are "Uncle Toms", a grotesque misuse of the phrase. &nbsp;VLS has made it quite clear that he has the same view of black people who don't have his own none-more-middle-aged-middle-class (the very thing he pretends not to be defined by) hang-ups about white people of his own class and generation being influenced by hip-hop culture. &nbsp;No, I don't defend Westwood's drift into self-parody and passive consumerism, but for VLS to say that people not born to his comparative privilege need more exposure outside their own ghettoes, but then to dismiss them for the crime of not being embarrassed by the things he finds embarrassing, just shows how hollow his stance actually is.<br /><br />It's the way it always works, of course; self-hating middle-class people - i.e. half of self-identified British satirists (the other half, the Hislop half, are vaguely self-loving people of the same background) impose their own embarrassment and shame on the less privileged and can only cope with the latter if they define themselves by that embarrassment and shame, only to find that those older contexts are meaningless to the global proletariat, who can create something new where they literally don't exist at all. &nbsp;Stonyhurst-educated early 90s indie boy Chris Morris is, in fact, a good case in point here; it's always depressing for me that one of the most-quoted and most-cited parts of <i>The Day Today </i>is a rather lazy LOL-before-the-fact at the idea of an African-American lifting a Phil Collins song. &nbsp;But of course in reality loads of hip-hop and R&amp;B people really do respect and admire Collins wholly unironically, because the history Morris wanted to escape doesn't exist for them; it isn't just that they didn't go to boarding schools where <i>Selling England by the Pound </i>was played endlessly by the senior boys, it's more that they literally don't know, and never will know, that that album was ever made, or that Peter Gabriel existed before "Sledgehammer". &nbsp;So Collins was a tabula rasa for them, a palimpsest, a completely blank canvas, and a Morris, or a VLS, has no right to condemn the African-American working class for not living up to their own 80s&nbsp;<i>NME</i>-Spartist vision of the noble fighters against imperialism. &nbsp;The African-American working class always gets there first, even (especially!) when they're defying posh Brits' cultural cringe at their ancestry.<br /><br />And it was a unity of intention and vision between that working class and its white-British equivalent which was the undoing of the original satire movement, painful as it is to admit. &nbsp;The Beatles had no hang-ups, no cringes, and for all the <i>TW3 </i>set's qualities, they had nothing that could live with that in the end, because in the end their culture had not moved away from the hierarchy of art forms and concepts of morality and behaviour which had defined their parents' culture. Their opposition to the ruling class was based on <i>wanting that class to behave better </i>- wanting them to be <i>more </i>like the traditional idea of the gentleman - and while I'm not denying the importance of what they did, in the end the working class wanted and needed something more. &nbsp;To this day, the mere concept of <i>Pseuds' Corner </i>attempts to deny the Beatles' very existence.<br /><br />A great shame. &nbsp;But an inevitable one, really. &nbsp;It has been suggested - mostly by me, admittedly - that if de Gaulle had said 'oui' (the central issue of the moment the satire boom emerged), Britain might actually have had the future envisaged in the official films of the BR Modernisation Plan; fantastically advanced technology, in some ways (specifically in terms of the public sector) more so than we have today, but social relationships and sexual taboos unchanged from where they were in 1960. &nbsp;And because such a Britain would have arrested the development of pop culture almost before it had begun, it might have been a Britain in which the <i>morality </i>of classical satire would have made sense. &nbsp;How can this one mythological concept - the Establishment club as, ironically, a counterpart to the Cavern for a different set of radicals-turned-fogeys - represent any kind of future, when it failed the test of Beatlemania one year short of half a century ago?Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-77948729248290889722012-08-27T21:52:00.001-07:002012-08-28T00:45:56.028-07:00Fragments of Elisabeth MurdochYes, yes, of course the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandtelecoms/9495850/Elisabeth-Murdoch-speech-in-full.html">full speech</a>&nbsp;for the most part is nothing like the bits everyone has quoted, being mediaspeak incomprehensible to anyone else. &nbsp;And it's easy to be cynical about the positive citations of "the best of the old Britain" and Lord Reith, Dennis Potter and Alan Bennett, easy to say that she's only saying that now the Olympics have put "Old Britain vs New Britain" if not to bed then at least taken it up the stairs, now it's safe, now some of the old battles and hatreds by which her father thrived don't feel quite so raw. &nbsp;And yes it is blindingly obvious and realised by some of us long before it would have occurred to her that, once they had won all their battles and usurped the old paternalistic order in every part of British society, <i>The Sun </i>lacked the absolute purpose it had, rightly or wrongly, had from (say) 75-87 and Sky likewise lacked the purpose it had from (say) 89-95; because they weren't really <i>for </i>anything to anything like the extent they were against the older elites, they had nowhere left to go after their triumphs, and were simply the embodiment of a much greater problem that the new capitalism, defined by its piratical rebellion, reached once the Keynesians and the Reithians were the ones locked outside the party - a problem of self-definition which could only have ended in the crash (and is also shared by almost all the babyboomers Murdoch got rich by targeting in their young adulthood when nobody else dared). &nbsp;But even though it isn't a (counter-)(counter-)revolution, it <i>is </i>the closest we've got so far to the "Suez moment" that suddenly became possible in July 2011.<br /><br />Consider that Murdochism was, at heart, the radical Right claiming for its own purposes a set of anti-establishment ideas on democratisation and opening up of the media which had originated on the radical Left of the 1960s and 1970s (search any&nbsp;<i>New Society </i>from that era&nbsp;and you'll find similar language on media reform to the sections of the 1989 speech she now selectively quotes, without the naked-capitalist bits she leaves out). &nbsp;Consider that much criticism of it from the Left, however well-meant, has appeared barely distinguishable from Tory paternalism in its attitude to working-class tastes, and has thus merely worked towards Murdoch's grand plan; to split and divide the Left by rendering it the true voice of fogeyism, inherently resistant to every aspect of the modern world, simply a stooge for the stuffy old buffers it once raged against. &nbsp;Through accepting the legacy of the people her family has for so long caricatured, as though the only Britain that existed before '69 or '89 was the stuffiest, most class-ridden 10% (the idea that Potter and Bennett were indistinguishable from some fire-breathing shire colonel was the single greatest myth <i>The Sun </i>and Sky alike had to create to get where they got),&nbsp;Elisabeth Murdoch, probably without even knowing it, has opened the door for the Left - however reformist, however cautious - to reclaim ideas on organisation of the media and society which it originated and developed in the first place. &nbsp;That has to be <i>some </i>kind of important moment, however compromised and shrouded.Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-65764829566547854722012-07-30T18:08:00.000-07:002012-07-30T18:15:34.656-07:00Why the Daily Mail and the Tory Right hate and fear the Olympics opening ceremonyIs there still, nigh-on half a century after Enoch Powell and Peter Griffiths, something in the water in the West Midlands (which begat Aidan Burley)? &nbsp;Am I wrong in fearing that anyone I hear with the accent (which in itself, unlike seemingly everyone else from the rest of the country, I rather like) has moved here for all the wrong reasons?<br /><br />But my very existence shows how dangerous the <i>Mail</i>'s hysterical (the hysteria of those facing and fearing defeat and comeuppance, as I will come round to later) attacks on the opening ceremony actually are. &nbsp;I'm white. &nbsp;I've lived more than half my life in Dorset. &nbsp;I like grime. &nbsp;I like it because I find it far more relevant to my life than Official British Music (whether that is classical or rock). &nbsp;I am sure that Paul Dacre would have me and many others hanged as race traitors, but that is the truth. &nbsp;This isn't 1963-style fogeyism. &nbsp;Nor is it simply considering rap to be a new and unfamiliar form, as it might once have been (Burley is only 18 months older than me; British acts like the Cookie Crew and MC Tunes were having crossover hits when he was a kid; when "Rapper's Delight" charted, he'd have been in the <i>cradle</i>).<br /><br />This isn't about music or the way music sounds; this is politics, pure and simple, and it has its roots in the defining territory of left-right politics ever since "we all agreed" on economic matters (Hitchens Minor's objection to the very inclusion of suffragettes - <i>suffragettes! </i>- is, even in <i>Mail </i>land, too far gone to be worth discussing; Burley's assumptions unfortunately aren't). &nbsp;Burley's belief that Dizzee Rascal "didn't belong" is simply a result of the fact that it contravened the right-wing idea that Britishness is a multi-tiered thing - that some people who know no country but this are less British than others, that national belonging is not something equal to all those born and brought up here but something tightly graded and classified and separated.<br /><br />The same philosophy dictates - actually for arbitrary reasons which are dressed up as though they were objective and final - that a form of music which has been hybridised and mixed in with other forms here for <i>thirty years </i>in a way that would never have been possible anywhere else (certainly not in the US) must still be considered less British than other forms which are equally imported and, quite often, <i>more </i>second-hand in the process. &nbsp;There are plenty of other people and forms which do not get anything like this opprobrium whose claim to absolute, unalterable belonging here is just as subjective as that of Dizzee or the form of rap generally.<br /><br />This has been the main factor separating Left and Right since the drawn-out collapse of traditional socialism (really a twenty-year process between roughly the mid-70s and mid-90s); the Left, broadly, believe that everything said or done in Britain is equally British, and that all people born and brought up here are equally British, whereas the Right believe, broadly, that there are levels and degrees of Britishness and that certain people and things need to stay in some kind of notional quarantine for longer before they can be seen as the equals of other people and things. &nbsp;Sometimes the Left can go too far; some parts of the Left, out of a well-meaning desire to avoid seeming paternalistic or dominant, have failed to stand up for the victims of sexism and homophobia among British Muslims, and I don't defend that for one moment. &nbsp;But even when Leftists allow cultural sensitivity to stop them standing up for people in minority groups who are treated badly, at least their <i>intent </i>was not to discriminate, even if it was misjudged. &nbsp;Even when they go against their own principles over sexism or homophobia - and sometimes they do, and to their credit many who once did now admit that - it has been because they regard Britishness as a cake of which everyone living here has an equal share. &nbsp;That is a far more noble mistake or misjudgement than anything made by Aidan Burley.<br /><br />The main reason why the <i>Mail </i>and its fellow travellers have disliked the ceremony so much is that it fatally weakens their own politics. For decades, they have made fertile political capital out of the politics of "either-or" and "us-and-them" and ridiculous "if-you-want-this-you-must-want-that" assumptions and equations; if you like Elgar you can't like Dizzee and vice versa, if you think diversity is broadly a good thing you must think everyone who lives outside a major city is a fascist, if you support the NHS you must want ice cream vans nationalised. &nbsp;Having seen the success of their American counterparts fuelled by the "culture-wars" narrative, they had worked out that they could achieve comparable success if they thought in similar terms, as the principal dividing line between them and the Left now that the latter had abandoned traditional economic goals. &nbsp;And despite the universality of the BBC offering a residually common narrative which simply doesn't exist in the US (which of course is precisely why they want it carved up; had the Tories of 1986-1994 succeeded in reducing the BBC to a <i>Telegraph </i>letters page version of PBS and NPR, Dizzee would never have escaped his ghetto), they have had a good deal of success with it.<br /><br />But then all of a sudden the Olympic opening ceremony comes along, and millions of people sense - instinctively - that it <i>isn't </i>either-or or us-and-them. &nbsp;You can like and respect and respond to both Elgar and Dizzee, both the romantic national myth of the countryside and the achievements of the Industrial Revolution, both the older traditions cherished by the Right and the post-war developments cherished by the Left. &nbsp;On Friday night, miraculously, it suddenly all seemed to be part of one narrative, part of a shared national story. &nbsp;Millions of people - many of them the very people the Right think of as natural allies in a culture-wars narrative - had seen Dizzee and <i>weren't frightened</i>. &nbsp;They recognised that this music isn't a break from the narrative of our history but a continuation of it.<br /><br />And suddenly a disproportionately powerful minority - along with, much worse, their lumpenprole footsoldiers - get frightened. &nbsp;They know that their power and success - at dividing and conquering - depends on one sort of working class seeing another sort of working class as alien, Not Like Them. &nbsp;They know that if the Middle England millions think of Dizzee as part of the same culture as them, part of the same narrative rather than something outside it, that fatally weakens their dominance, their ability to set the national narrative in terms of who or what "fits" or "belongs". &nbsp;They know that the Olympics' very ethos is wholly opposed to theirs - and they know that its application to Britain exposes their reading of our history as a partial and politicised one.<br /><br />So really the success and popularity of, and national coming-together over, the Olympics opening ceremony suggests that millions of people who the <i>Mail </i>and the Tory Right thought were loyal footsoldiers in the culture wars might actually hold a far more open and broader view, a far less narrow and exclusive one, of what it is to be part of this country. &nbsp;And a certain set of people cannot face that, as they know it might mark the end of their ability to set the agenda. It's exactly the same as the retrenchment to fear and nativism that has gripped the US Republicans since the moment Obama got in, and which lies behind their terrifying attempts effectively to fix the election through disenfranchising his most likely supporters. &nbsp;It would have been far more surprising if people like Burley <i>hadn't </i>been so upset. &nbsp;Twenty years ago nobody like Dizzee would have been there at all, because multi-tier Britishness was still far more dominant across the board. &nbsp;The frustration of people like Burley is really the frustration of the impotent, those who know - secretly - that their short-term victories in culture-wars gesture-politics hide a deeper, long-term defeat. &nbsp;And we know how <i>that </i>kind of frustration tends to come out ...Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-54825762050056404492012-07-09T17:20:00.001-07:002012-07-09T17:27:52.645-07:00In the new spirit of reconciliation and freedom from history ...... between the English and the Irish ...<br /><br />... may I make the polite request that those who would have historically considered themselves most ineffably opposed to the English anti-Catholicism with which it unfortunately became mixed up (Sinn Fein voters, Celtic fans - come on, it's not as if anyone else will be able to win the SPL for the foreseeable future) - make a conscious effort to reclaim the tradition of autumn bonfires? &nbsp;They are, after all, part of their own tradition, part of the Celtic pagan inheritance. &nbsp;They got mixed up with the Protestant revolution and all the unnecessary hatred and bloodshed, lasting well into my own lifetime, that resulted, and they were (unforgivably, and almost certainly hastening their decline in England) misused by certain <i>Mail </i>or <i>Express</i>-reading types to suggest that all Irish people were potential terrorists. &nbsp;But that does not change their origins, nor does it change their immense potency and power, their evocation of things beyond normal human understanding, their sense of - ultimately - life and death.<br /><br />More to the point, it has become necessary to champion them simply as a means of detracting from the imposition of American-led commercialism on the process of the seasons for <i>all </i>of us in both the islands, and of undermining the ludicrous pretence of some in Ireland (who really, really should know better) that a victory for US big business is in some sense a victory for them (when in fact those commercial forces menace the autumn traditions of Ireland just as much as they do those of England, and for very much the same reasons and with - thus far - seemingly as little serious resistance). Autumn bonfires were a means of marking the change of seasons centuries before the Gunpowder Plot. &nbsp;They can and should be so again. &nbsp;The divisions and hatreds that have turned families and brothers against each other for centuries - and thus the inability, until now, to create a unified front for <i>all </i>the peoples of the two islands against the forces of exploitation and degradation - have been a significant factor in the forces of global commerce laying waste to the traditions of all parts of the two islands, and exploiting the arguments of the left (which it would not otherwise care about one iota) to present them as "racist" or "backward" (when what it really means is that it cannot make enough money out of them). &nbsp;Now that those old hatreds are seemingly - finally - dissipating and being recognised as impositions and restrictions which hold us all back in a way that can no longer be afforded, could this also be a moment for the English and the Irish to come together in favour of autumn bonfires, for whichever reason you want them and whoever or whatever you want to commemorate or not, as against the Americanised version of the festival which the Irish and Scots once thought was theirs? &nbsp;That festival and autumn bonfires share the same origins. &nbsp;It is time to use the reconciliations of 2011 and 2012 in both parts of Ireland to bring them together again.Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-30220659189587098452012-07-09T16:49:00.000-07:002012-07-09T20:28:17.672-07:00Why the Beatles sound better under Cameron than under NuLabYes, yes, I know I posted here many times in the run-up to the last election that I'd never be able to listen to the Beatles again once the social tribe I had wrongly believed they had laughed out of power for good in 1964 was back in government. &nbsp;Yes, yes, I did listen to "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBgUaEpnDdY">I Should Have Known Better</a>" on election night, staring desperately at the sea I've so often wished could be drained to nothing, genuinely believing it would be the last time. &nbsp;But strangely enough, things didn't turn out that way. &nbsp;The Beatles actually sound better to me now - stranger, more rebellious, more of a challenge to the dominant ideology of the ruling elite - than at any time since before the Blairites and their pop-cultural allies got hold of them and turned them into a front for all the timewarping and imposing of fixed agendas on the working class that they ever opposed in their time. &nbsp;The Beatles - or at least their <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLeaV5SKqCo">mutant</a>, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW6G3nh5S3I">uncontrollable</a> side (why did I ever dismiss "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" as blues-bore purism? &nbsp;It's easily the best and strangest thing on <i>Abbey Road </i>- an album which otherwise offers ample proof as to precisely why their split was necessary, and the fact that a teenage Alan Parsons was an engineer on it is frighteningly, chillingly apt) - have been rehabilitated, freed from elite manipulation, by the very event I thought would finally rob them of all meaning for good.<br /><br />What has made the difference is that our current rulers come from the first generation for whom the Beatles are Before Their Time, a mere detail that contains no personal or emotional resonance and may have been dismissed as an unwelcome parental imposition (indeed, their adolescence was during the very period often dismissed during the Blair/Britpop ascendancy for not sufficiently venerating the band). &nbsp;George Osborne was born a year after <i>Let It Be </i>was released. But Ed Miliband was also, crucially, born when they had more or less ceased to exist. &nbsp;It works both ways; the Beatles being History (if not quite, yet, Proper History) to a politician may be a factor in a complete inability to see that alternatives to neoliberalism even <i>exist</i>, a significant reinforcement in an institutional belief that pop culture is merely a front for increasing elite power, but it might also be a reason (Miliband was born at Murdoch's first Christmas; McDonald's first came to London when he was four) for that politician being open to at least quasi-socialist ideas on the organisation of British society, without being blinded - as the Blairites were - by the misleading childhood glamour of Radio Caroline and tabloids and fast food seeming exotic and unobtainable. &nbsp;Not having lived in the pre-Murdoch world utterly closes some politicians to other options, but makes some politicians far more open to other ways than those who actually grew up in it were.<br /><br />Virtually throughout the first thirty years of my life (with a slight reversion to older ways under John Major) Britain was governed by former members of one or other of the two great revolutionary movements of 1974. &nbsp;In my childhood, during which most of my considerable pleasures came from the dying embers of the pre-1979 world, those who - after early political careers which they would later dismiss, with Britain itself at that time, as drifting and directionless - sensed that their time might be coming when they Found Themselves as part of the right-wing anti-state movement of the mid-1970s held sway. &nbsp;In my late teens and twenties, from which I can take few positive recollections of any kind, erstwhile members of the mid-70s radical student-left who had <i>also </i>supported the withering away of the state, albeit for entirely different reasons, came to the fore, having created a brilliantly cynical hybrid between their old pop-cultural loyalties and 80s neoliberalism which they (absolutely and entirely correctly) now recognised was a far more potent and workable method of enforcing their anti-old-establishment cultural visions and post-Marxist enthusiasm for global capitalism - the capitalist stage of the Marxist process with the ending changed (a phrase which effectively describes New Labour, the American neoconservatism it embraced so enthusiastically, <i>and </i>to a great extent Thatcherism; never forget Alfred Sherman's political origins).<br /><br />But now, for the first time, those whose political thinking was developed during the tumult unleashed by Harold Wilson's cathartic defeat-in-victory have retired from the front rank, never to return. In the process, the Beatles really have become Proper History - and thus, as they never were before 2010, immune to the distortions and misinterpretations of the political process. &nbsp;Nothing can touch them now; the elite no longer care anyway. &nbsp;We have a rising political elite for whom the mid-1970s were about nothing so much as Brian Cant and Geoffrey Hayes (if even that), not a grand-scale left-right power struggle. &nbsp;And that can mean anything the politicians want it to. &nbsp;It can mean what George Osborne wants it to mean, or what Ed Miliband wants it to mean. &nbsp;What do <i>you </i>want it to mean? &nbsp;That is as decisive a question in 2012 as "what do you want the collapse of the post-war consensus to mean?" was in 1975. &nbsp;Nobody can afford not to answer it. &nbsp;There is the Cliff Richard / Duran Duran / Dappy answer, or the Beatles / Human League / Trilla answer. &nbsp;How will you answer for yourself, if the judgement of history condemns you for not giving the latter answer sufficiently loudly and forcefully here, now?Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-85893315396778037212012-06-16T22:29:00.001-07:002012-06-16T23:01:34.297-07:002012 as reverse 1975: further evidence<a href="http://shirazsocialist.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/cruddas-a-useless-waste-of-space/">Shiraz Socialist</a>&nbsp;think Jon Cruddas is hopeless and any new ideas Labour might have are futile. &nbsp;Well, with the best of respect (and they deserve quite a bit, not least for being one of the few left blogs not to put opposition to "the West" in totality before the right of the Jewish people to a place of safety), they would. &nbsp;They're theorists, so obsessed with ideological purity that they're above concern about people's actual lives. &nbsp;The left equivalent, in some ways, of those on the right (and there were quite a lot of them, though very few would admit to it later) who thought neoliberals were already permanently defeated by 1975 so shouldn't even bother trying to seize power. &nbsp;And this is where the key comparison steps in; as I've written&nbsp;<a href="http://in-the-cage.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/201011-19745-in-reverse.html">previously</a>, almost every aspect of current British politics is redolent of the mid-1970s, only with the right in the position the left were then, and vice versa. &nbsp;Dominic Sandbrook's recent work has been well-timed in a manner he probably did not intend, and may well disapprove of.<br /><br />Raised as my generation have been in an environment where capitalism has seemed unalterable, irreversible and unreformable, we cannot easily consider a time when, having recently made a stalled and overpowered attempt to assert itself over the dominant ideology of corporatism, it momentarily stood on the sidelines, humiliated, forced out of government almost overnight, genuinely seeming doomed in the eyes of quite rounded and educated people (it is incredible how little the Barber Boom / Slater-Walker Government period, so rapidly overthrown and so widely seen as ineffective and compromised, but in fact so crucial as a blueprint for what now had to be enforced much more aggressively and forcefully, is even talked about now, and I'll give Sandbrook his due for recognising its importance - I'd be surprised if 1% of the people who've heard <i>The Dark Side of the Moon</i>, which however codified and vague and globally-applicable its lyrics may be wouldn't exist without that context,<i>&nbsp;</i>know who those people and organisations <i>were</i>).<br /><br />Hauntingly, a Welsh miner in the 1975 polemic&nbsp;<i>The Miners' Film </i>- repeated, with rueful introduction and epilogue, on Channel 4 during the strike a decade later - says, without irony or ambiguity, "we're gradually understanding now that the greatest power, the most important people, are the people that produce. &nbsp;And I believe that 1974 was the turning point, when this power was realised for the first time". &nbsp;At that point, few could see that it <i>would </i>be the turning point, but the turning point for a counter-revolution; not the moment where the working class began to take over, but the moment which unleashed and set free the neutering of that class's political power. There is, I'll confess, not a day - sometimes not a moment - when I don't imagine how different my life, and the norms I came to take for granted, might have been had the Tories won the February 1974 election (and they very nearly did) and the radicalisation of capitalism had not been given the platform to grow. &nbsp;Might we have become a completely different country; no destruction of industry, no Murdoch empire, no commodification of politics?<br /><br />But when the radicalisation of capitalism gained irresistible traction - despite having come about merely through an accident and a fluke of history, and despite being institutionalised after its early struggles in government through, as we've all been reminded this year, an even greater accident and fluke - it did so out of a sense of <i>emergency</i>, of absolute determination and now-or-never politics-of-apocalypse, out of a genuine and justified fear that if they didn't get back in next time, their whole world would have crumbled and could never be restored (when do you think you the phrase "late capitalism", which seemed a sick joke by the time I became familiar with it, was first used? &nbsp;Why do you think, even though Roger Waters is so clearly a nihilistic cynic with little if any faith in the radical potential of humanity,&nbsp;<i>Animals </i>ends with the hint of genuine revolution?). &nbsp;In Cruddas' <i>Observer </i>interview, the same feelings in reverse - a determination that this radicalisation of a three-decade consensus, by its creators now turned far more fundamentalist and fanatical than they could ever have been when the seeds were first planted, has to be reversed for <i>everyone's </i>sake and not just the sake of the class the party may be seen to represent (part of Thatcherism's genius - and it was a genius; hardly anyone else could have sold such ideas to the working class and won - was its ability to convey essentially pro-ruling-class politics as more democratic than those which had preceded them, to redefine the position of the working class as making Andy Gray rich rather than allowing Trevor Griffiths to exist) - can, fascinatingly, be sensed.<br /><br />However tentatively, and however problematic some of the communitarian ideas may be in practice, Cruddas is hinting at the idea that what may be presented by the ruling class as "unalterable reality" may, in fact, be reformable by those with the will - in other words that it is time for the left to "think the unthinkable" as the right did then (and this is where many left blogs are, ultimately, as relevant to the lives of the people they claim to represent as those who felt neoliberals should remain in their academic fringe groups rather than push to "change the way a generation thinks about politics" were relevant to the capitalist class and its self-interest in 1975). &nbsp;His talk of "the edge of a crisis" has not been heard in quite this way from thinkers in a recently defeated party, seen as lacking in vision and confidence and with a need to reinvent itself, since that time, when those with an interest in maintaining their own privileges blamed an economic implosion caused by global forces wholly outside Britain's control, even then, on the strength and power of the British working class, and interpreted any kind of working-class role in the institutions of the state as a harbinger of the collapse of the state itself. &nbsp;The sense of time running out before neoliberalism becomes utterly irreversible - that the even flow of politics, with one ruling party seamlessly giving way to another and little really changing, <i>has </i>to be replaced with something more dramatic and fervent - is also redolent of the Tory radicals who emerged in the wake of Heath's humiliation; a desire to remake/remodel politics as an urgent battle, a fight to the finish that must be won by the side remaking itself in opposition, lest everything that side has ever fought for be destroyed irreversibly.<br /><br />Cruddas' refreshing indifference to the power of the <i>Daily Mail </i>and its ilk is redolent of the mid-70s Tory radicals' lack of concern for the <i>Daily Mirror</i>, then still the most read and most important newspaper for the mass of the population and a key cipher in its relationship with the elite, a paper that - even with the fast-rising <i>Sun </i>nipping at its heels - it was still felt you did not mess with if you wanted the working class on your side. &nbsp;And the fact that the elite ideology of the last 30 years was created in what seemed the least welcoming and receptive environment imaginable to capitalism reigniting itself and owning the near future - and indeed that of its two defining newspapers, <i>The Sun </i>in 1968 did not even exist in its current form and the <i>Mail </i>was on the racks, facing a seemingly insoluble identity crisis and inability to find a niche for itself -&nbsp;should remind us of an important fact; that what seem like unalterable, unchangeable ideologies only become so because a few people think the unthinkable against all the odds and against both subservience to the elite ideology on the side that created it and "you can't change anything now" cynicism on the side that didn't. &nbsp;This is so both for the current ruling ideology and for the ruling ideology that came before, the one that radicals of both sides were tearing at by 1974.<br /><br />This is the sick joke behind those who say that rejecting neoliberal capitalism now would be like rejecting breathing or eating, that it is an unchangeable reality on a par with air or water. &nbsp;It only became so because a few people believed that the world didn't have to work like that. &nbsp;If it can happen once, it can happen again. &nbsp;This is the main lesson we can learn from the 1970s; that predictions that a change is "unworkable" and "impractical" may well be viewed by history as, quite simply, wrong. &nbsp;And just as the knowledge that in the 1930s most of the ideas written into the British state after the war would have been seen as hopelessly romantic and deluded probably convinced many Institute of Economic Affairs ideologues that there was mileage in practical politics for them after 1974, it is this which keeps me away from the anti-political cynicism of the far-left, however accurate some of their other analyses may be.<br /><br />Of course, I'm acutely aware that I could have got all this wrong. Perhaps, out of sheer desperation and desire to escape from the world that made me and which I rejected as assuredly as the makers of modern Britain rejected the corporatist world they had been brought up to see as unchangeable, I am seeing things where they don't exist. But it does seem as though, just as the radicalism of a minority Labour government convinced a previously marginalised and embattled right that the platform was there for the unthinkable to be thought and the future redefined, so has the radicalism of a government without a mandate, which was formed out of almost nothing and which speaks for nobody except the privileged, opened the door for ideas which it seemed might never have a place in the Labour Party again.<br /><br />Had the right confined itself to theoretical writings and Peterhouse debating societies, Britain might well have become permanently socialist; that alone should convince far-leftists who see practical politics as beneath them that for those of us who care about any kind of social justice and equality, <i>this is an emergency</i>, a time when normal rules of <i>politesse </i>cease to apply, every bit as much as it was for those of the other side in the mid-1970s. &nbsp;Just as was the case then, there is a straight choice of outcome for the next general election (the Lib Dems' involvement in the coalition has effectively ended the century-old centre-left divide and, surely, pushed much of their support towards Labour): either the paradigm shift that history teaches us should happen every 35 years or so, or the inverse of the ending that to many seemed most likely in the mid-70s, neoliberalism's long march through the institutions being completed beyond repair.<br /><br />Last time, <i>they </i>won, and successfully changed the ending from the one widely seen as inevitable to the one that created the only world I've ever lived in. &nbsp;This time - however much it would compromise some people's self-regard - we need to make sure that <i>we </i>win, and change the ending to our advantage. &nbsp;<i>They </i>only won because every last one of them joined in. &nbsp;If <i>we </i>realise that, then 2015 could well be remembered as the next in the lineage of 1945 and 1979. &nbsp;Anti-political cynics should not complain if Cameron leaves office, never seriously challenged, in about 2021. &nbsp;They will have got precisely what they deserve. &nbsp;Amid that 70s tumult, Roy Harper correctly wrote that the victor writes the books but the loser speaks the lines. But in moments of crisis and uncertainty - such as we have now entered again - losers have the chance, which comes along perhaps only three times in a normal human lifetime, to become victors off their own back, a chance that simply is not open to them in normal times of complacency and certainty. &nbsp;This is such a moment. &nbsp;Even if "reformism" seems narrow and restrictive, we must remember that the initial ideas of the Centre for Policy Studies, which were to revolutionise much of the world, initially seemed merely the Tory equivalent of reformism. &nbsp;The door is open. &nbsp;To help our enemies to close it in the name of our own sectarianism and purity would be the most dangerous decision of anyone's lifetime, one for which our grandchildren will hate us. &nbsp;The time simply isn't there. &nbsp;Critique and question Cruddas' ideas by all accounts; there are certainly plenty of holes there. &nbsp;But don't, whatever you do, ignore them.Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-82108197058282156612012-02-11T18:38:00.001-08:002012-02-11T18:45:27.055-08:00Whitney HoustonIt's as if Whitney, in her heyday (and bete-noire-for-the-pop-cultural-left day), more than MJ, hinted at some kind of <i>post-racial </i>America. Only Diana Ross had got so deep into Middle America's heart before her, and the fact that Whitney's break was amid a reversion to reactionary politics rather than the context of the Civil Rights Act meant that there seemed far less radicalism hidden beneath the gloss. But the Star Spangled Banner at Super Bowl '91, right in the middle of the Gulf War, was a genuine moment of emotional unity in America, and in its own way it might be a step on the road to Obama's eventual victory. It was also, in many ways, the beginning of the end for Houston herself. She'd gone so far, gone to so many places where once she could never have gone, touched so many lives that would once have had no room for her, that she was bound to be judged by impossible standards. And when that happens to someone who had come so far, it's the surest possible road to the other extreme. "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxZD0VQvfqU&amp;ob=av2e">My Love is Your Love</a>" is as special as it is because it makes no attempt to hide what she'd been through, that the voice of the huge hits was fucked, and still holds out hope for redemption, rejuvenation. Failing to live up to Middle America's impossible dreams could still, at that moment, have been the start of a new beginning. Sadly, it wasn't. Sadly - and think of this with <i>The Sun </i>on the racks - the world that had made her what she was could only destroy her in the end.Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-53816645456598767092012-01-13T11:37:00.000-08:002012-01-13T15:04:37.785-08:00High Speed 2 and England's eternal conflictWhen I was a child a stone's throw from the current site of Ebbsfleet International station, there were vain hopes that the Channel Tunnel rail link would be ready by the time the Tunnel itself was completed, and thus avoid the 13-year tragedy/farce of one of Europe's greatest trains being forced to crawl along congested Victorian lines (hopefully it would also have avoided the unnecessary demolition of Waterloo's Windsor station, but I don't expect anyone else reading this to care about that particularly). There were many reasons why this did not happen - most of them connected to the chronic underfunding and deliberate government destabilising of the then still-nationalised British Rail, which effectively rendered any major, long-term project impossible - but part of it had to do with the staunch, virulent hostility of many residents of Kent to its construction. There is something quite frightening about old news footage of the protests against the link - the attitudes that had been stirred up clearly went considerably beyond reasonable environmental concerns, and into a whole other, more unsettling territory.<div><br /></div><div>The instructive thing about this hysteria is that many of the same people had seen no problem whatsoever with the building of the M20, and any number of other projects which had diluted Kent as they had always dreamt it, but - crucially - had no direct connections to the political red rag of Europe. Even beyond the fact that most would have been Tory voters who had absorbed Thatcher's rhetoric about public transport being for "losers", there was a deeper political subtext to the pettiness and insularity of the opposition. What, eventually, became High Speed 1 was opposed in Tory heartlands not because of where it was going <i>through</i>, but because of where it was going <i>to </i>- a place from which these people had cherished an (almost entirely mythological) vision of separateness and isolation. Anything which brought this scary, hostile land across the Channel closer <i>to</i> them was a threat. Supposed concerns about its effects on the landscapes it would go <i>through </i>were just that; a flag of convenience, a quick and easy cover.</div><div><br /></div><div>Exactly the same rhetorical smokescreen is currently being revived over High Speed 2. I don't think the shrill shire-Tory voices really care, in most cases, about the areas they object to the line going <i>through </i>(because if they did, why didn't they object when those areas were ruined for other reasons and other purposes years ago?). What they do feel, much more profoundly, is a deep-rooted antipathy towards the areas it is going <i>to</i>. Lord Astor gave the game away with his conspiratorial suggestions in <i>The Spectator</i>, redolent of the language we heard from Tories at the turn of the century when they had pretty much given up capitalism for the Blairite duration and reverted to pre-industrial nativism, that "northern Labour MPs" actively <i>enjoyed </i>seeing the Chilterns built over, out of an antipathy for the region's lingering quasi-feudal ways, that they took pleasure out of seeing a Tory heartland defiled (his suggestion that the internet should be used as a method of contact instead is an unintentional sick joke when we remember how, in the days of foot-and-mouth pyres and Countryside Marches, people like him were suggesting that its very <i>existence</i> was a dangerous socialist plot). In some cases, he may be right. But if anyone in the Labour Party thinks in such tribal terms, it is only a response to equally tribal thinking on the other side.</div><div><br /></div><div>Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds (Glasgow is suddenly an entirely separate issue, one I will get to in my next post here), the cities that High Speed 2 would bring closer to London, are the cities the Industrial Revolution - and, indeed, the original railways - built. They are the fervent, ever-faster-beating hearts of mercantile capitalism - and thus, by their very nature, a threat to the assumed social prevalence and superiority of the aristocracy. Right from the moment they became great centres of commerce and industry, they challenged aristocratic values with a vibrancy and vitality which, in many ways, proved irresistible. Except when it came to the final challenge, it didn't; the extreme national constitutional stability (in so many ways more of a hindrance than a help) which is the result of an accident of geographical location ensured that the traditional ruling class retained a residual stake in national affairs, the result of an uneasy trade-off with the capitalist class who had made those cities great (and also built the railways, very much against the will of the landed gentry; the railways turned thriving, comparatively advanced regional centres that rejected them into quaint feudal relics just as assuredly as they turned Swindon and Crewe from villages into the heartbeat of an empire of industry). England's eternal conflict was never really resolved, merely put on the backburner in the vain hope that everyone pretending to get along could make people forget about it (just as had happened after Cromwell and the restoration of the monarchy), and that is the real division in everyone's lives, a division that has - in its own uncanny, second-hand ways - permeated tensions in our own time such as that between prog and punk, or between the BBC and ITV in the '70s. It's always there, somewhere, all the stronger for the attempts of several lifetimes to pretend it is just an insignificant, trivial difference (you don't try so hard to hide something unless you're profoundly affected by it in the first place).</div><div><br /></div><div>The harsh fact is that to acknowledge the vital importance of Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds at all, to recognise that their much greater populations (certainly when combined with their <i>de facto </i>suburbs/extensions) gives them a greater deserved stake in the national debate, a bigger deserved slice of the pie, than the quasi-feudal shire hangovers that mercantile capitalism's great compromise gifted a status beyond their true significance, is to undermine and threaten the place in national life that the aristocracy had the extraordinary luck to retain even in the <i>birthplace </i>of mercantile capitalism (but did not cling on to in many countries where it was a relatively late adoption). Despite the resurgence of the monarchy and the various well-documented cultural phenomena which have set the tone for the Cameron era, the aristocracy and their hangers-on still feel a deep sense of cultural uncertainty which may superficially appear to be left over from the Blair era, but is in fact the legacy of industrialisation itself (a clear line of descent; remember how Blair spoke openly about seeing the whole era of left-right politics, now a bigger part of the national debate than they have been for two decades, as an accidental island of history, and about his own aim being to restore the connection between social and economic liberalism that was lost in the early 20th Century, and to recast the Tories not as capitalists but as feudal reactionaries against his own position as a modern-day Whig; Blair, more even than Thatcher, was a far truer descendant of those who <i>built </i>the Industrial Revolution, as opposed to the upper class who resisted it or the working class it created, than any prominent figure in the politics of the mid-20th Century).</div><div><br /></div><div>Those who object to High Speed 2 on their doorsteps are really, underneath, objecting to their own children having a greater identification with the modern-day version of mercantile capitalism as expressed by the popular culture of the cities it will serve (not least because they are increasingly able to price the people who actually live in the Midlands and North out of those cities' universities) than they have with Julian Fellowes. They may also resent Cameron's support - presumably out of a residual One Nation Conservatism - for High Speed 2 as a means of breaching the North-South divide; even a slight desire on Cameron's part to apologise for the increased divisions even within England that he must know his own government is creating is politically suspect for them, and almost makes him some kind of class traitor. For them, the Midlands and North, and specifically their great cities, are best kept at as great a distance as possible because they embody a way of existence that they <i>have </i>to resist for their own lives to make sense. To paraphrase Auberon Waugh during the GB75 years, they don't want to get into other people's lives so much as keep those other people out of their own lives - and High Speed 2, with its symbolic ties to the other England with which their own England never had a final, decisive conflict, so much as an endless, unanswered question and <i>savage war of peace </i>for command of the country, never quite fought to the finish and thus never truly won by either side, is the epitome of what they want to keep out the most. Never forget that the areas most closely affected by <i>both </i>high-speed lines have been among the few to retain grammar schools this side of the '70s.</div><div><br /></div><div>I support High Speed 2 above all else because of its symbolism, because of its sense of rebirth, because of its linking us with the rest of Europe, because of its modernity, because of its giving a whole new lease of life to the cities that built the modern world. This, rather than anything more technical and practical, is also entirely why those who oppose it are against it. There really aren't any other positions. Not here. Not in England.</div>Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-52920673399535732562011-12-13T14:27:00.001-08:002011-12-13T15:33:07.413-08:00Gilbert AdairOne of the things that stood out from <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/dec/09/gilbert-adair">the <i>Guardian </i>obituary</a> of Gilbert Adair was how similar his clear desire to distance himself from his early life, his refusal to talk about any aspect of it, was to that of many British people of his generation who were in every other respect his antithesis, his nemesis. I have spoken often enough before about my great sadness that so many of Adair's generation aspired in the opposite direction to him both geographically and culturally, and the long-term damage this did to British society; there could not have been a more grimly appropriate night for such a man to leave the world, a night when the ruling elite decisively and perhaps forever refused and rejected his view of everything this country could potentially have been (at least if - as I think became a lot more likely at the end of last week - that country is England in constitutional realities rather than just off-duty romanticisation; it may be more apt than he'd have been able to believe for the vast majority of his life that Adair was born in Edinburgh).<div><br /></div><div>And yet, of course, I was often as alienated from Adair himself as engaged by him; we came from wholly separate worlds, and no amount of guilt on my part could change that. I admired - sometimes almost loved - him <i>precisely because </i>he never even <i>tried </i>to inhabit my world; precisely because he did not compromise, stood out as a corrective force. Had he attempted to come to terms with the world I, however unwillingly, take for granted, he'd have been worse than useless, as hopelessly impotent as Cameron in Brussels. His presence justified itself; he did not need to play by anyone else's rules or criteria, least of all those of the new, post-Blair establishment, and precisely because of this he made many of us doubt everything we thought we knew (and, just as importantly, everything we thought we didn't know). As much as Jake Thackray or Tony Judt, he is a parallel public figure of the Britain that might, just, have emerged had one operation succeeded, and another not attempted in that form and in that way. He is as great a loss as could be imagined.</div>Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-87913543556975305772011-11-13T14:44:00.000-08:002011-11-13T19:32:04.103-08:00The coming battle for the BeatlesAcutely related to the profound change and upheaval in mass culture in the 1960s and 1970s, instigated above all others by the Beatles, was a profound reassessment and re-evaluation of the culture historically considered by academics to be beyond debate, above all other cultures. Tensions opened up - often dividing new universities from old, and (at least initially) those taking advantage of the post-war expansion of mass education from those who'd have had the privileges anyway - between those who stuck to the old hierarchical view of culture, with the innovations of the post-war world considered a mere impermanence, a passing fashion, and those who felt that the development of mass culture far away from the simplicities of the Brill Building and the pre-1960s Hollywood studio system, and into the world of Bob Dylan and the American New Wave cinema, required a reassessment not only of mass culture itself, but of the stuff historically considered to operate on a wholly different plain.<div><br /></div><div>The new wave of academics gave particular attention to the initial poor reception given to works of canonical high-cultural figures, such as the hostility to <i>Don Giovanni </i>when it was first performed - something historically played down by pre-1960s Mozartians - so as to point out the essential subjectivity - contrary to its official position of objectivity - of the old guard's rejection of rock music. They assessed Shakespeare much less in terms of his having written about the privileged classes (an approach to his work which can only appear now as the starting point for those who assume that someone of more privileged background somehow <i>must </i>have been the true author), and much more in terms of his non-privileged background and his work being a form of mass entertainment in his own time (and thus having instigated a lineage manifested in the 1960s &amp; 70s by the original incarnation of <i>Coronation Street</i>, by <i>Armchair Theatre </i>and <i>Play for Today</i>, and by the works of Potter, Plater and Rosenthal above all others). A person's stance on this matter became symbolic of wider divisions in society, and in many people's eyes (on all sides) a sign of what sort of country a person believed in and wanted to live in.<div><br /></div><div>As the Beatles' era fades into history and their generation begins to die off in significant numbers, I can sense a similar debate over the control and ownership of their legacy becoming a divisive issue in the years to come. As things stand, the Beatles are perhaps the most misunderstood mass-cultural phenomenon within living memory, venerated as they are by many petty-minded, fearful Little Englanders who deny the very cultural process - the British working class rejecting the idea of some mystical, spiritual connection with "their" ruling class, and uniting with the oppressed classes of other societies to create a new, unique hybrid which was at once both acutely of its own place and joyfully internationalist - without which they wouldn't have existed.</div><div><br /></div><div>Many of those who claim to love the Beatles most are, in fact, their greatest enemies, denying as somehow inherently "un-British" any current manifestation of the very same process without which there would never have been such a thing as the Beatles, a process which has recently reinvented and redefined what can be "pop music" in the UK, as necessary as a rejection of the current New Etonians as the Beatles were as a rejection of the 1951-64 governments. Just as it was necessary after the upsurge of pop culture to strip aside much of the distancing language and gilded-cage veneration that had come to surround the Shakespeares and Beethovens, the titans of the old culture, and to reassess their radical, questioning origins, then it has become equally necessary to strip away the official, heritagised version of the Beatles - as crucial to the new establishment in Britain as Shakespeare or Beethoven ever were to the old one - and reassess their absolute rejection of fixed, frozen cultures and of elite disconnection from the mass, their absolute faith in the same form of oppressed people's expression which today, filtered through hip-hop as they were filtered through what was then R&amp;B, is manifested above all else in grime and dubstep.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now as then, the official version - almost entirely untrue and delusionary - of how certain Great Figures came to be (by no means just the Beatles where 1960s &amp; 70s music is concerned), is putting many of the people who need it most off investigating it; now as then, those who claim to love it, but in fact are the descendants of the Little Englander conservatives who would have hated it when it was new, spread the malicious canard that those who understand where it came from, and set it in a context with the inventions and challenges of today, somehow do not "really" love it. The hostile, abusive stance many of the old guard of Beatles fans take towards those who dare to mention grime and dubstep as part of a lineage instigated by their heroes is overwhelmingly reminiscent of the fearful, defensive stance of Shakespeareans when the techniques and processes of television drama were first mentioned in the context of Shakespeare's work.</div><div><br /></div><div>Among much else, this also reminds us of a profound truth of British life, which is that conservative academics and conservative lumpenproletarians need each other for each other's security and to remain safe in their own unchallenging worlds, and that neither challenges the other to even the slightest extent. It is wonderfully appropriate that a 1995 <i>Sunday Times </i>article (about Elvis Presley) should speak approvingly of an alliance between the "he's-not-worthy-of-study approach" and the "let's-not-get-too-pretentious approach", because without such an alliance, and its specific manifestation within the Murdoch empire, the right-wing press, and the outmoded assumptions on all sides which it thrives on, would simply not exist. Before the Beatles can be seen in their true light, <i>both </i>forms of conservatism need to be dismantled, or at least seriously challenged (though in some ways, an extreme nativist such as Peter Hitchens - Jurassic Tory as the equally Little Englander Dennis Skinner is Jurassic Labour - understands the Beatles, in his hatred of all they stood for, far more than any Tory hack who superficially likes them ever could).</div><div><br /></div><div>In 2011, most of the audience for grime and dubstep does not think of those musics in context of the Beatles, any more than most of the audience of <i>Coronation Street</i> in 1961 thought of it in context of classical drama. But as time goes on, and the Beatles become much less a sentimental memory of a generation that cannot face its own privilege and the consequence of its denial of those privileges to the generations behind it, and much more an objective field of study - a <i>subject for further research</i> - the true context of both then and now should become much more open, always assuming (and it may, alas, be an over-optimistic assumption) that the ever-increasing inequality of academic life and the age-old British bigotry of dehumanising intellectuals do not hold it back.</div><div><br /></div><div>Much of the romantic, overstated nonsense that has come to surround the Beatles is already being deprecated and exposed as largely a fiction as the dust settles on the 60s; for example, it is more and more recognised that while small towns and villages <i>did </i>become less themselves, less self-sufficient during and after the Beatles' era, this had far more to do with essentially coincidental forces such as the growth of supermarkets, driven by capitalist power rather than working-class invention, which would have happened even if the world of Bobby Vee and <i>Gidget</i> had lasted substantially longer, and was already starting to happen even before "Love Me Do" (in some ways, the purely passive and wholly Tory Brook Brothers anticipated modern British consumerism far more than the more proactive, engaged Beatles did).</div></div><div><br /></div><div>What made Ian MacDonald's <i>Revolution in the Head </i>stand out in 1994 seems shockingly ahead of its time today; his view that Thatcherism was largely the natural descendant of the mainstream of 60s pop culture (which actually had much less to do with the Beatles than is commonly supposed) rather than a reaction against it, which at the (just) pre-Blair time was seen as a form of apostasy, even blasphemy on both Left and Right, but is now recognised and accepted by many prominent thinkers on all sides (though it shouldn't be used, as it sometimes has been, to justify the idea that "Blue Labour" is Labour's best way out/back). Even with the many faults in his analysis - if he believed, as he claimed when briefly analysing the mediocrity of much of the individual Beatles' solo work, that "pop/rock is essentially young people's music", surely he should have recognised that he was not in a position to denounce all 1980s &amp; 90s innovations within it, many of them born out of the exact same cultural engagement and relationship that defined the Beatles' very existence, so harshly and simplistically - the refusal of his analysis of the 60s to play by the stereotypical dogma of either Left or Right alone justifies his book.</div><div><br /></div><div>Recently, Jonathan Gould has written eloquently about the Beatles' cultural legacy from the post-Blair standpoint MacDonald did not choose to live to see, and Peter Doggett has written authoritatively about the bitterness of the divisions within the band and their associates over their broader legacy, which has for so long seemed to embody the absolute opposite of the virtues the Beatles in their own time, for all their faults, very largely stood for (at least before 1968). It will not be long now before those who remain from the band and their social circles, and those millions who had their lives fundamentally changed by their existence, really are going, and going, and then finally gone. I have a decent chance of living to see their centenary; I will most likely outlive even the equivalents of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch among those who saw them in person. When that happens, they will undoubtedly be a less widely-acknowledged, less mainstream phenomenon (they already are, I think, compared with pre-millennial times), but they will seem - are already seeming - stranger, in many ways far more ancient and yet in other ways newer and fresher, when seen from a viewpoint unencumbered by the distortions of half-remembered, mythical personal (or even parental, and eventually even grandparental) pasts.</div><div><br /></div><div>The division will not be over whether or not they are seen - as is stated at the very end of <i>Revolution in the Head</i>, we could not know in the 1990s precisely <i>how </i>they would be seen when their own generation had gone, but we already knew <i>that </i>they would be seen - but over <i>how </i>they are seen; as the gilded-cage justifiers of petty-minded conservatism and fear, or as the developers (even if not the actual originators) of all that is open and challenging and outward-looking in mass culture, as the voice of the working class speaking out against elite abuses of power and in favour of the global unity of the proletariat. Let us hope that the passing of time eventually allows the latter view of the Beatles to decisively win. If the former view wins, Cameron and Welch and Adkins and the BRIT School will also have won, and we will all be infinitely poorer for it. If the latter view wins, grime and dubstep and the unacknowledged, still unkillable radical lineage in British society will also have won, if only by proxy, and we will all be - in all the senses that matter - immeasurably richer.</div>Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-79622470831314245012011-11-06T09:40:00.000-08:002011-11-06T10:15:31.975-08:00Dusk, and the impermanence of lifeDaylight on 21st June and darkness on 21st December feel like they could go on forever, precisely as human life cannot. Dusk, at any time of year, is impermanent, precisely as human life is; you relish every moment of it all the more because you know how soon it will be gone and how elusive and impossible to define in straightforward, logistical language it is, precisely as human life is. And walking as daylight dies - especially at this, still somehow, despite everything, the <i>oldest </i>time of year - makes you ever more acutely aware of your own mortality. You walk faster, go to places you don't know, and may not even know where you are, so as to fit it all in before darkness (11/11). And somehow you can <i>feel </i>the place in which you live - and thus somehow feel fuller, more complete - in a way you never can at any other time. You want to live all the more fervently, all the more <i>involved</i>, because you've had a sense of a deeper, longer belonging. Even if you can never truly be part of it, you want to <i>believe </i>you can. You realise that there was a point after all, you just never remembered or felt it.Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-48223170307769275842011-11-05T14:02:00.001-07:002011-11-05T18:04:55.855-07:00Alex Ferguson: an alternative history of the last quarter-century<div>The precise timing of Ferguson's career turning points run in such parallel to the modern history of English football itself - itself so much a mirror for the social history surrounding it - that it is almost too perfect to be true. The same years of struggle and uncertainty in the late '80s, the same moment of serendipity in 1990, seven minutes away from Wembley humiliation, a European shut-out in the first year of English clubs' return and probable oblivion, the same moment of celebration as a new kind of elite returned the success whose restoration had become what seemed like a futile obsession, the same millennial ultimate triumph and ultimate old-establishment embrace, the same eternal, endless status - permanent neoliberalism - on the other side. Precise dates can be identified. A YouTube upload of the September 1990 European return, just as BSB headed further and further towards the inevitable, has several commenters stating that they became Manchester United fans that night - six months earlier, they would so clearly have aspired towards the mythos of the NFL (while ignoring its semi-socialist reality) that you do not actually have to be a Palace fan to find reading them a painful experience.</div><div><br /></div><div>Even the timing of Ferguson's original appointment is symbolic. We know that this has become perhaps the most bitter time of year, when we are reminded most harshly of the market as destructive force, eroding so much of value and lasting potency and power (infinitely more ancient and permanent than exaggerated and misremembered residual anti-Catholicism), and replacing something embedded, and for the most part wholly unthreatening and unprejudiced, with something hollow, empty and utterly devoid of resonance. We may not remember so easily that it was also at this time that, 21 years ago and another 21 years before that, Rupert Murdoch enjoyed two of his three greatest territorial advances, and when a further 13 years earlier an entire culture was discredited, ripped apart, rendered untouchable for an entire generation - a fully deserving fate had it not been for the fact that its replacement, once so promising, ended up arguably even more rotten, even more the detritus of a decaying empire. These weeks, which carry so much historical weight, have become almost unendurable for their meaning in modern times - and Ferguson, in his own way, is as much a part of that as anything else.</div><div><br /></div>Ferguson, I think, suffers from the same underlying problem as the 'Republic of Mancunia' axis; like them, he has continued to regard an affinity to American pop culture (and thus Sky) and antipathy to "official" British culture (and thus the BBC) as somehow rebellious, unorthodox and anti-establishment, even as it has become so embedded in elite institutions that Etonian Tories use it to justify their claims to be more "of the people" than Labour (you cannot help fearing that some of the "Manc Attitude" diehards really do believe that Cameron and his acolytes feel more personal and spiritual affinity to the BBC than to Sky). As with so many of his generation, so anxious is he to distance himself from the squalor and deprivation of his early years in his current job that he views any criticism of the economic state he has benefited from so spectacularly - while pretending to be somehow above it, not fully part of it - as an attempt to drag the game back to Heysel and Bradford, and himself back to the slums of post-war Glasgow, a simplistic view of modern history which exists to close down any serious argument and debate before it has even begun.<div><br /></div><div>Far from representing any kind of challenge to the orthodoxies of the modern game, he is thus their ultimate embodiment, the epitome of the false, either-or dichotomies and the one-way Journey <i>as if there had never been another option</i>. Trapped within the dicta of capitalist realism even as he pretends to be uneasy with them, he epitomises the dilemma of so many British people with post-war, pre-Beatles childhoods, now steadily retiring from the public stage but leaving a legacy which continues to define their successors as assuredly as it will, eventually, define his. Nobody else could be a more fitting bridge between the old game and the new, and precisely for that reason nobody else could have had that level of success. And precisely for both those reasons, nobody else poses deeper long-term problems.</div>Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-41412575588654688082011-11-01T12:40:00.000-07:002011-11-01T18:22:31.710-07:00EMI, post-imperial reassurance and the ruling classI loathe the idea - currently being promoted by vast swathes of the British media - that I am supposed to care about EMI, or to see any kind of moral distinction between exploitative, short-term capitalists based on which country they come from (Guy Hands' practices were arguably worse than the worst 1950s caricature of the rootless American, itself so often shorthand for anti-Semitism), or to think of pop music predominately in terms of the industry rather than the music itself, or to view pop music as predominately a tool of nationalism and the ruling class rather than a form in which the oppressed classes of the world can unite and reject petty nationalism (even more so when it comes from within their own social backgrounds than when it is promoted by elites). Let EMI be carved up between American and Russian ultra-capitalists. Wholly unlike pop music itself, EMI isn't worth saving; quite apart from anything else, the form it has taken is a threat to everything that has ever made pop music a progressive, liberating force, and a barrier to representative popular art.<div><br /></div><div>The fact that EMI was the sole British survivor in its field from the era of limited capitalism within national borders to have remained a dominant force in the era of uncontrolled capitalism which knows no borders whatsoever has enabled a huge amount of sentimental mythology to surround it, which promotes pop music as something it never was (and indeed never could have been, and defined itself by not being for most of its first thirty years), and fundamentally ignores the cultural process that brought that music into being. Listen to most of the people crying crocodile tears over EMI - the same people who thought it was a moral outrage when a company producing tasteless, badly-made pseudo-"chocolate" was acquired by a set of capitalists who theoretically owed allegiance to a different country from that the previous lot theoretically owed allegiance to, but actively support the sell-off of the National Health Service - and you'd think the Beatles, without whom EMI would have been absorbed, almost unnoticed, decades ago, were a bunch of merry Olde Englishe grateful peasants, happily chirruping nonny-nonny-no and annually laying a wreath at the old squire's grave.</div><div><br /></div><div>The reality is that not only did the Beatles represent a fundamental rejection of Little Englander nationalism and the idea that the mass of people should be subservient to the ruling class - something implicitly believed by those who have little interest in the creative arts themselves but plenty of interest in ensuring that their gatekeepers will always be exactly the same people acting in exactly the same way - but that even they might not have been enough for EMI to last this long had the British company not also owned their US label, Capitol. We all know that Decca had first refusal on the Beatles, and that had they taken up their option they might have survived until now whereas EMI might have disintegrated, unnoticed, at the dawn of the Thatcher era after years of stagnation, but the real serendipity for EMI was that they had acquired Capitol some years earlier, in a rare example of a declining power absorbing part of its usurper's business. Accordingly, the Beatles' US income - which was where their real money came from - could ultimately remain part of, and be ploughed back into, the British company that had signed them. This is a rarely-acknowledged truth for the precise reason that it points out a deeper truth that would bring the Tory distortion of pop's legacy crashing down; even half a century ago, Britain was already a ghost of a nation, which could do nothing meaningful on its own terms, and the "British Invasion" was really a momentary papering over the cracks rather than any kind of meaningful rebirth. The fact that it was the only way a Britain exiled from Europe could make any significant money or earn any significant international kudos for itself only makes the foundation stones of the modern EMI all the more retrospectively chimaeric.</div><div><br /></div><div>Ian Gilmour was undoubtedly right when he wrote in 2003 that had the British been more nationalistic twenty or thirty years before, and prevented much of their mass media and entertainment industry falling into foreign hands, they would have been less nationalistic by then, because they would have had much more genuinely of their own and therefore much less need to fall back on kneejerk, vicious tabloid Two Minutes' Hate. This applies, if anything, even more perfectly to the role pop music has played in the creation of the current version of Toryism. Imagine if the British had not embraced the most obvious, most consumerist version of pop with such totality and fervour - demanding the impossible, but predominately, for the mass, of capitalism rather than socialism - during the quarter-century between Suez and the Falklands, and had instead shown a greater appetite than they actually did for new hybrid forms which were nonetheless more heavily rooted in earlier British culture (a Britain where Fairport would have had bigger hits than Free, perhaps). In such a world, much of the nationalism that surrounds those who would preserve EMI from the economic policies they normally cheer on wholeheartedly - Our Music, Not Like All That Nasty Foreign Muck (without which not a note of it would ever have been recorded, of course) - would not have had the chance to grow, because the British would have had enough that was unobtrusively, proudly but harmlessly <i>their own </i>that they wouldn't have needed it.</div><div><br /></div><div>But even if you have a more positive view of pop's first quarter-century than displayed above - and I do myself, much of the time - few could deny that the cycle has been broken and that the EMI myth is at the heart of that process. In the last ten years, the epicentre of EMI's role at the core of the greatest nationalistic distortion of an open-minded, liberal-internationalist form since First World War flagwavers began the never-ending distortion of Elgar has been Coldplay, a phenomenon as crucial to the creation of the current form of Toryism as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies "thinking the unthinkable" were to the last reinvention of that movement. The reason why so many of us genuinely believed, for a while, that the Tories might never get back in was that after 1997 it was obvious that no government peddling an essentially <i>pre-pop </i>vision of Britain could ever be elected, and for a long time it looked as though the Tories would never be able to reconcile themselves with pop's legacy, which still had a residual hint of egalitarianism (even if never socialism) about it. Had it not been for the wave of ruling-class scions denuding pop of any hint of its original political meaning, and refuting any belief in the solidarity with the oppressed peoples of all countries (and against the ever-more global ruling class) which underpinned every note the Beatles played, that reconciliation might have been postponed forever.</div><div><br /></div><div>Through enabling the creation of a whole new establishment culture - with just the right crumbs thrown at the proles just often enough to make themselves look "inclusive" (Chris Martin's regular association of himself with "urban" acts is surely the model for the Cameronite house "ethnics"), and through combining a passive, uncritical consumption of mass culture with passive-aggressive, One Of Our Own flagwaving - EMI and Coldplay, with the latter carrying the former's flag as a cypher for the Union flag itself, have effectively allowed the current government and all it stands for to develop almost from nowhere. Yes, <i>Billboard </i>can point out they've got Professor Green as well, but those who think EMI is some great national asset, a St Paul's for the modern secular religion, couldn't care less about (even) <i>him</i>. The objectively pro-ruling class - and thus anti-Beatles and, ultimately (even considering what pop meant for the Neil Sedaka or David Cassidy fans, the <i>Photoplay Film Monthly </i>readers, the white picket fence dreamers) anti-pop - reporting of EMI's likely defenestration is telling me that I should care about Coldplay's contract being in the hands of a part of the capitalist elite based in one part of the world rather than another, even though Coldplay's music could have been made by and for the ruling class pretty much everywhere (but not by or for the oppressed classes anywhere). What can be said about an idea of nation that has been reduced to this?</div><div><br /></div><div>I never thought anything could be worse than old-fashioned British nationalism. I was wrong. Pop British nationalism is, and almost every word written about EMI proves it. Let it, and EMI, rot.</div>Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-83021359468894599302011-11-01T08:39:00.000-07:002011-11-01T12:43:33.157-07:002010/11 = 1974/5 in reverse?In March 1974, a minority government came to power following a hung parliament, which despite its questionable remit proudly and unashamedly attempted to push the consensus of the previous three decades measurably further than anyone had taken it before. A sense of triumph and pre-revolutionary fervour among the working class, and an equal sense of paranoia and pre-revolutionary fear among the ruling class, spread through the country. For a brief while, the Tories seemed utterly out-thought and outflanked, and something close to a workers' state seemed tantalisingly near, really far more so than in 1945 when the working class had been far more conservative and had far more faith in the quasi-feudal institutions (it is one of the great tragedies of British television that the changing climate in television drama and political pressures on the BBC ensured that Trevor Griffiths' <i>Country</i>, set on that first post-war election night, remained a one-off rather than the start of a sequence of plays, running up to that 1974 moment, as initially planned).<div><br /></div><div>But that Labour government had a fatal fault; it didn't have enough broad-ranging public support for its remarkably radical agenda (whereas in 1945 it very definitely had). It wanted to take the populace in a direction not enough of it wanted to go, and thus opened the door for another kind of radicalism. Even though Labour later shifted to a more consensual position under Jim Callaghan (who, intriguingly, recently won Peter Hitchens' seal of approval, and would surely be considered underrated, with both his proto-SDP <i>and </i>hard-left opponents seen as overrated, by the Blue Labour tendency) the semi-revolutionary circumstances in which it had come to power and the electoral fragility of its remit did for it - and, by extension, for an entire set of assumed norms of the organisation of the economy and society.</div><div><br /></div><div>The similarity of the mid-1970s situation to the present one seems intriguing, at least from the perspective of those who believe that electoral politics - despite its profoundly, inherently flawed form with which an early heatwave, a royal wedding and a late Easter may have ensured we are now stuck for the rest of our lives - have to be worked with if significant change is to be effected. Once again, a hung parliament has given us a government with an unequivocally radical agenda, taking the consensus of the previous three decades considerably further than anyone has previously dared. Once again, we have the logical conclusion of what would have happened had those who had built a three-decade consensus abandoned all residual halfway houses with the previous assumed norms. And once again, it is happening at precisely the moment when significant numbers of people, who would not previously have questioned it, are wondering if that consensus, and the people it has empowered, have been good for the country. </div><div><br /></div><div>The economic crisis that began in 2008 is now emerging as to the post-1979 consensus what the industrial strife of 1972-4 was to its post-1945 equivalent - the moment when much of the population began to question what it thought it knew unequivocally and forever. And just as those circumstances, which were the direct reason why it was in power at all, made things far more difficult for the Labour government of 1974 than they would otherwise have been, so are the present circumstances, and the way they are similarly encouraging many to cut loose from their fixed economic and political moorings, creating hostility to the current government among people who would once have supported it unquestioningly. Even in Thatcher's darkest hours in the very early 1980s, there was a broad public consensus (at least outside the heavy-industrial areas) that industrial relations had to be reformed - a view that was already developing across much of society by the mid-1970s. Today, the closest thing to a broad public consensus is that banking and the financial service industries need to be reformed - and this is as profound a problem for the current government as dissatisfaction with union abuses was in 1974/5.</div><div><br /></div><div>This is where Ed Miliband has much of the public - indeed, much of the public that would never previously have accepted his views or thought they were necessary - on his side in a manner remarkably akin to the way Margaret Thatcher, right at the start of her Tory leadership, was already, quite unexpectedly, winning over some who had voted Labour with pride and the desire to create a new society in 1945, and who had broadly stuck by them for the subsequent quarter-century. I do not want to over-emphasise my hopes for the current Labour Party. There is a long way to go in the party's rebuilding, a long way to go before I can believe unequivocally that an Ed Miliband government would be what can only be vaguely imagined now. But at least the germ of questioning and change is there in a place where it seemed it might never be again.</div><div><br /></div><div>Could it be, perhaps, that the current government will be viewed by history very much as the Labour government of the mid-1970s is viewed today - as an extreme assertion of a set of ideas on the economy and society just before they were decisively challenged and overturned - and Ed Miliband's conference speech will be viewed as Thatcher's early speeches are, as a statement that was widely mocked and viewed as marginal and unworkable when it was made, but eventually stands out as the beginning of a fundamental change?</div>Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-10302812452237113252011-10-12T04:44:00.000-07:002011-10-12T08:07:31.356-07:00English football and modern England: getting America wrong, badly<div>(Many thanks, as so often, to David Conn in <i>The Guardian</i> for placing the idea of this article in my mind)</div><div><br /></div>Between the collapse of the culture of imperial entitlement and autarky and the rise of the culture of neoliberalism and institutionalised inequality and poverty disguised as "democracy", getting America wrong was what made Britain great. For all that it may have been used as a sticking plaster on Britain's ongoing failings in so many areas (it is important for those of us who prefer the economic model of that time not to deny that the seeds of its demise were sown very, very early on), the <i>creative misinterpretation </i>of American music - specifically the music isolated and ghettoised in a semi-apartheid society - was the starting point for a cultural rebirth, genuinely convincing many that the collapse of British power could be the starting point for a whole new form of invention and challenge.<div><br /></div><div>Everything in English football that has led to Liverpool's statement of intent yesterday is the byproduct of the years when all that broke down, when Sunday evening Channel 4 brought in a misunderstood <i>image </i>of American-ness - now with no pretence to any kind of true democratisation, merely the neoliberal mirage of "freedom" - as the way out of a dying prole culture that was by then so rotten, so vile, that it didn't <i>deserve </i>to survive. This piece is a brief argument - a whole book could be written about it, and should be - that with different politics and a different way of seeing the world, we could have found a quite different way out, which quite apart from being truer and fairer to the people of modern England, would also have been truer and fairer to the people of the United States.<br /><div><br /></div><div>This is very obviously not how the NFL appeared to British audiences during the Huey Lewis / <i>Miami Vice </i>years that unconsciously begat the Premier League, but American sports are in at least two ways profoundly <i>un-American</i>, at least in terms of the <i>idea </i>of American-ness that defines modern Britain; they have a quasi-socialist structure (a vitally important fact which is not generally known in the UK for all the most predictable reasons; both new and old prejudices are at fault here) and they are not globally exported. If they had been - for which you would probably have needed the US to have been an <i>active</i>, unashamed imperial power in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Oceania when Britain was, rather than mired in its own isolationism whose legacy is still reflected in sport - English football would have been most unlikely to gain its <i>scale </i>of global appeal; it has got this big because England seems, on a broader cultural level, like the Next Best Thing to aspirational Westerners, and the involvement of American capitalists in English football has to do with the fact that it offers them the chance to be American in the most stereotypical (and, within British socialism, pejorative) sense - extreme financial dominance over their lesser rivals, without any institutional structures to bridge the divide and make the sports more fair, and status as a ubiquitous global product - which they could have if they worked in the US film or pop music industries, but which their own sports deny them.<br /><div><br /></div><div>It is a harsh irony that it is Liverpool that should have instigated this; when the Beatles got America wrong, they made its influences much <i>more </i>socialist, much <i>more </i>collectivist than they had been originally (yes, yes, I know, first track on <i>Revolver </i>from now till doomsday, yes, yes, I know, Oliver Smedley, but earlier on they'd taken "Money (That's What I Want)" and somehow, miraculously, made its legacy, its impact, seem wholly compatible with the politics of the Left), but now the city's most successful team - which was at the core of the tragedies from which Thames Estuary politics dictated that neoliberalism was the only way out, even though most of their core supporters knew, and still know, that it wasn't - have taken one of the few aspects of American society that <i>is </i>comparatively socialist and collectivist and made it a parody of greed and selfishness; a parody of its supposed inspiration that only reveals how little it knows about it, and what it is, and <i>why </i>and <i>how </i>it is what it is (Thatcherites, Blairites and Cameronites, in this respect, have actually understood America significantly less than Macmillanites did back in the birth years of British consumerism).</div><div><br /></div><div>This is the inevitable legacy of the Thatcher-and-onwards <i>interpretation </i>of American-ness which gets its source wrong in a manner as socially alienating and divisive as the beat groups getting America wrong (not least in terms of identifying with its oppressed classes, and recognising the Bobby Vees and Neil Sedakas as the playthings and safety valves of the very same overclass that had oppressed <i>them</i>, here) was socially unifying and utopian. To say that English football has become "more American than the Americans" would be too simplistic, only halfway there; a fairer analysis is that it has become the embodiment of a fundamental <i>misinterpretation </i>of a country which in fact - however it presents itself today - was <i>not </i>founded on mere consumerism and certainly not on glorifying inequality for its own sake, and is every bit as patronising, ahistorical and anti-democratic as any "Greece to their Rome" paternalism ever was. English football in 2011 is not doing America proud. It is, in its own way, letting America down just as much as the Tea Party.</div><div><br /></div><div>Obviously English football was broken beyond repair in the mid-1980s (which is why those who call Stoke City a "breath of fresh air" are so enraging) but those who, desperate to escape <i>Songs of Praise </i>and <i>Highway</i>, flicked between "St Elmo's Fire" on the Network Chart and the Chicago Bears during the blackout really didn't know what they were doing. It wasn't their fault, obviously; they were the victims of someone else's ideology. But think of the difference; the Beatles didn't know what they were doing when they first heard R&amp;B and Motown, but they did something wonderful and liberating <i>almost by accident</i>. The gridiron class of '86 also did something <i>almost by accident</i>, but something that strengthened and enforced elite power as definitively as pop originally promised to erode it. In the light of what the Premier League has become, that moment stands out as the decisive time when <i>getting America wrong</i> ceased to be a force for liberation and became a force for dehumanisation, when it ceased to be our national saving grace and became, instead - sadly unpredicted and unpredictable - our greatest national sickness.</div></div></div>Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-27983991449331487672011-08-13T11:07:00.000-07:002011-08-13T19:12:36.172-07:00The New Left did not cause the riotsNeil Clark's <a href="http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/82927,news-comment,news-politics,neil-clark-left-and-right-are-both-to-blame-for-this-weeks-uk-london-manchester-riots">analysis</a> of the socio-political causes of the riots is typically simplistic and kneejerk. While I agree wholeheartedly where Thatcherism is concerned, I sympathise with the argument that much of it was merely acquisition and not legitimate, thought-out political protest, and I abhor those who think there is something Left-wing about defending McDonald's or market-led film distribution simply because David Starkey or Peter Hitchens don't like them, he is on profoundly shaky ground when he starts playing the <i>Mail</i>/<i>Telegraph </i>card and suggesting some kind of almost mystical, spiritual link between the intellectual-Left's rejection, during the 1960s and 1970s, of the old hierarchical structures of what was considered to be of worth and value, and the elite corruption and social alienation and dislocation - the institutionalised social divisions and poverty - which reached their horrible, inevitable final manifestation this week.<div>
<br /></div><div>As in much of his previous work, he greatly romanticises the social position of the working class in the Macmillan era, which teaches us the significant lesson that full employment, and free Oxbridge education for a lucky few, is not enough in itself; not if the elite wants to trap the working class within an ordained, fixed culture which was simply no longer enough for their aspirations and desires; not if the majority are given an education only slightly more advanced and challenging than they had had in the pre-war world; not if the state is on the side of those who would freeze them out of their communities for having sexual or emotional desires which, for some, are natural and unavoidable. If that social order was so wonderful, why did millions of working-class people - most of whom had little or nothing to do with the New Left as an intellectual movement, and would barely have recognised such a concept - embrace R&amp;B and rock so enthusiastically? That alone shows that there was dissatisfaction with the certainties Clark longs for - but which he was not alive to experience himself - far beyond the theorems of intellectuals (whom he almost dehumanises in an unsettlingly tabloid way). No matter that these forms have become the establishment culture for the present neoliberal elite; in their day, they <i>were </i>genuine forces for liberation, and the working class could not have lived in "the cultural 1930s with better pay and better job security" (pretty much the 1951-64 government's safety-valve plan; certainly, that seemed a much less quasi-socialist era at the time than it does to retrospective popular historians) forever.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>If taken to its logical conclusion, Clark's argument - as would be expected of someone whose idea of a collective, mutual, socialist statement within pop is JJ Barrie's "No Charge" - is that <i>any </i>kind of invention, innovation, challenge or argument within popular culture is in itself a neoliberal, anti-socialist act. Quite apart from also suggesting an apologist (as Clark also is) for the autocratic abuses of power enacted in the name of "socialism" in the former Eastern Bloc, it reveals a cretinous failure to distinguish between the multiple forms within pop - between true, multi-layered, expression of an oppressed class which involves a solidarity with all those struggling throughout the world, and the mere indulgence of the ruling class and its playthings. Clark is wilfully ignoring the difference between Justin Bieber or The Wanted, and the sort of passive, one-way fandom they encourage and are defined by, and the active <i>involvement </i>of - and here I'm confining myself to those who are part of mass pop, and thus a problem for those (whether of Left or Right) who hold autocratic views on culture - Katy B, Chase &amp; Status, Nero, even Tinie Tempah (those who think, pace "Till I'm Gone", that he's automatically selling out if he shakes Prince Harry's hand should consider that there are just as many people who think Prince Harry's selling out if he shakes Tinie Tempah's hand; Peter Hitchens, for whom Clark has expressed admiration in the past, is very clearly among them).</div><div>
<br /></div><div>As is an inevitable, inherent condition of Daily Mail Socialism, Clark is lumping elite safety valves and messengers with a form of - however confused, however compromised - genuine expression of an oppressed class's feelings. He is suggesting that the working class have a perfect, ordained role in society, as long as they do not actively challenge the ruling class's preferred forms of expression. How can such a quasi-feudal method of social organisation provide any kind of answer to the urgent social questions asked by the riots, when it failed the test of post-war mass education half a century ago? Clark, who has expressed kneejerk tabloid anti-hip-hop prejudice on previous occasions, is coming dangerously close to siding with David Starkey's grotesque <i>Newsnight </i>comments, where the adoption of black pop (which, as Tupac definitively said, was given this world; it didn't make it) by the mass of the working class is seen as a bigger cause of the riots than decades of institutionalised quasi-apartheid. He detracts from the accuracy of his own attacks on Thatcherism by bringing a wholly understandable desire to break from the narrowness of the <i>other </i>long period of post-war Tory rule into his argument.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>As an Old Left partisan - someone who cannot accept, however firm and unquestionable the evidence may be, that his "side" ever abused its power and caused long-term damage to Britain - Clark blames Thatcherism purely on the New Left because he cannot face the truth; that the organised Old Left, as manifested in the trade union movement, created the platform for the Thatcherite reaction by misusing their considerable privileges during the early 1970s, and effectively intimidating Labour into power at a time when they simply weren't ready. The resultant social context - where the Old Left (vast numbers of whom posed, as Enoch Powell correctly stated when defending his fatal intervention in the February 1974 election, no threat whatsoever to his own belief in racial and cultural hierarchies) had left a moderate Tory leadership looking weak, ineffectual and out-thought/fought on every front - has infinitely more to do with the Thatcherite takeover of the Tory party than any amount of academic radicalism and relativism could ever have done. To suggest that Thatcherism did not gain strength and pick up popular support - especially from what used to be called the upper working class, who were its greatest electoral foundation stone - as a result of Old Left belief that they owned Britain (and were as determined to keep out those who were facing great working-class struggles in other parts of the world comparable to those in Britain in the 1930s, or the liberation musics of working-class movements worldwide, as "scabs" or "blacklegs" from their own movement), and never needed to compromise on any issue, is as deluded as it would be to suggest that the desire of millions of servicemen in the 1940s to vote Labour once the war had been won had nothing to do with the entrenched attitudes of the officer class and military establishment.
<br /><div>
<br /></div><div>It is perfectly true that New Labour combined elements of New Left cultural thinking and Thatcherite economics, but to suggest that because this happened in the 1990s there must have been some inherent, organic connection between the two ideologies from the start, is a form of historical retcon - one of many tendencies in Clark's writing that serious historians (among whom Clark is not numbered) would never indulge in. The Thatcherite movement had little, at heart, to do with culture, certainly much less than the Blairite movement did; the increased dominance of pop culture (through media deregulation) and decline in the assumed hierarchical position of high culture (through the reduction in school funding for concert and museum visits, etc.) which have come to be regarded as among its key legacies were merely incidental aftereffects, not central policies. It was purely and simply about crushing British socialism and marginalising those within the Tory party who were seen as having appeased it, not about spreading within the Tory party the ideologies associated with the then-new universities and polytechnics. Keith Joseph, in 1975, would have had no more time for those views than Norman St John Stevas would have.</div><div>
<br />Clark would no doubt assume that Thatcher's deregulation of British broadcasting increased the amount of airtime given to the ideologies and values of his hated New Left, which of course would show how little he knows about modern British history; the old structure, which he praises only for its heritage dramas and Perry &amp; Croft sitcoms (loved in vast numbers by GB75-ers in the actual 1970s, as opposed to the xerox of the era he half-remembers from childhood), also allowed New Leftists to reach the largest possible audience through radical drama and documentary. The Broadcasting Act of 1990 was intended specifically to marginalise and freeze out to the point of oblivion this New Left influence, not to get rid of "hearty family entertainment". <i>Dad's Army </i>and <i>Upstairs, Downstairs </i>are still endlessly revived; <i>Days of Hope </i>and <i>The Price of Coal </i>are only now being made available commercially, and BBC Four rarely represents that era as it did when many/most people couldn't yet receive it. Clark's belief in cross-class politics - which would be perversely touching were it not so dangerous - means that even when he praises something that was fundamentally good, he does so for all the wrong reasons.</div></div><div>
<br /></div><div>There are multiple reasons and multiple causes for the riots, which do indeed reveal a profound corruption and desolation throughout vast swathes of British society (which is why Clark's simplistic, wrong-headed "blame <i>every single aspect </i>of the modern world" rhetoric is a million times more enraging than someone blithely insisting that nothing is wrong at all). It should be obvious that every single suggestion Cameron has made will, if anything, make things even worse, will merely increase social exclusion, thus alienation, thus despair, thus the platform for something like this to happen over and over again. But Clark would, in all likelihood, <i>agree </i>with Cameron that Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger are somehow "to blame" - (literally) shoot the messenger, shoot the messenger, shoot the messenger, you might as well have blamed 2Tone and the existence of the 7-inch single 30 years ago - and that is where I differ as profoundly from him as from Cameron himself. Institutionalised nostalgia and anti-modernism will get us no further than Cameron's headline-chasing short-termism. Only a more profound change will get us anywhere - but the society that change would lead to would have to be at least as different from the society of 1961 as from the society of 2011. Anything else is institutionalised lying and delusion, as much so as any of the political ideologies and institutional inequalities and unfairnesses which led to the riots.</div><div>
<br /></div><div>Daily Mail Socialism is no more a way out than Cameron's straight-down-the-line Mailism. It is important to remember that, at this low point of British life and society, and to regard Clark's rhetoric as merely the flipside of Cameron's papering-over-the-cracks populism, rather than any kind of answer. For that, we will have to look far beyond. To, indeed, a reinvented and re-radicalised - and de-Blairised - version of the New Left. For all that movement's eventual faults, a belief in the liberating power of oppressed classes expressing themselves through mass culture, and in the global unity of the proletariat, is far more likely to offer some kind of way out - of the nihilism and desperation and disenfranchisement which was so horribly manifested this week - than magic wand politics and semi-feudalism. Ed Miliband should listen, carefully.</div>Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-73181466159229289482011-07-12T14:44:00.000-07:002011-07-13T19:16:45.779-07:00Murdoch: some thoughts<div>Those who bring about institutionalised corruption in any country at any time - the sort which absorbs virtually the entire elite (politicians, police, the judiciary) and renders it almost impossible to gain power without yourself being absorbed by it - only ever get away with it because they have sensed, and exploited, a pre-existing public demand for what they are good at cheapening and perverting, and also sensed that the mass won't be able to tell the difference between what they do and the real thing. A good comparison is between Rupert Murdoch and John Poulson, who in his time was at the centre of as sensational an affair as this (and one which arguably, through discrediting both old-school Toryism and post-war Labour utopianism, gave Murdoch a far greater space in which to operate). Poulson was only able to corrode and corrupt British public life in the way he did because of the initially wholly progressive post-war desire to build a "New Britain", which he duly perverted beyond recognition. Murdoch, likewise, was only able to do what he has done because of the longings and desires of '60s pop culture, which he initially exploited when he first bought into the British market in a way no other newspaper proprietor at the time would have dared to.</div><div><br /></div><div>But this comparison - at least for a defender of other, better aspects of post-war British development such as myself - opens the way to a more nuanced view of pop culture than I may have displayed in my previous post. If I do not blame Le Corbusier for the corruption indicted when the Poulson affair went public, I also cannot blame '60s pop culture for the corruption and distortion of British life that Murdoch's power has brought about; the parallels, in terms of a positive and progressive movement being perverted almost beyond recognition for the empowerment of the venal, self-serving and destructive, are astonishingly close. It would be as unfair for the people who make the music associated with Channel AKA, or those behind the non-exploitative, non-tabloid channels which have used the Sky platform (and there are some!) to be tarred with Murdoch's brush as it was for certain architects who stood for everything Poulson didn't to be tarred with his brush, as they inevitably were in the <i>Mail</i>/<i>Express </i>mind, after everything went public. Almost immediately after that, of course, Britain suffered the disastrous year of 1974, when the extremist, Europhobic wings of both major parties were decisively empowered, and the centrist, European-minded wings of both fatally weakened; an all-round corrosion of balance and reason within the British political mainstream whose horrendous consequences we still suffer every day, not least because <i>The Sun </i>gained strength as a direct result of the void thus created. Every abuse of trade union power from 1974-9, culminating in the height of futility which was the 1979 ITV strike (whose political impact was, arguably, the real birth of Sky) represented thousands of alienated <i>Mirror </i>readers and, accordingly, thousands of mental blank canvasses for Murdoch. In its own way, this whole business is the single worst aspect of the corrosive legacy of socialism's fatal February, which appeared to some at the time - both its critics and its supporters - to be potentially a world-changing victory, but was in fact the beginning of a terrible, long-term defeat.</div><div><br /></div>One argument I absolutely do not endorse is the idea that if "somebody else would have done it anyway" that makes the bad things that actually happened somehow more defensible, not least because, when it comes to extreme forms of corruption, somebody else probably <i>wouldn't </i>have done it anyway. Someone else probably would have exploited the "New Britain" dreams to build cheap crap, and someone else probably would have exploited the impetus of '60s pop culture to publish cheap, crowd-pleasing crap (even if he hadn't been so <i>politically </i>odious, Robert Maxwell would undoubtedly have done just this had he won the battles for the <i>News of the World </i>and <i>Sun </i>in 1969, quite apart from everything else we know all too well). But someone else probably <i>wouldn't </i>have done the other, more profoundly damaging things that Poulson and News International have both done in their respective times. The difference is important, and should be kept in mind when cynics and reactionaries on the Right, or SWP tribalists on the Left, say "it was always inevitable anyway" - an absolute fundamentalism which renders any kind of progress impossible. It is possible for popular, mainstream media to be wholly socially responsible if properly regulated and balanced. Even today, Ofcom has sufficient power - just - to ensure that no major channel could become quite so shameless and venal (which of course is precisely why the Murdoch tabloids constantly attacked it as though it had the IBA's powers), while the pre-Murdoch history of British mass television offers a shining example, probably better in that field than anything else that has ever existed anywhere in the world, of cheerful populism combined with a fearless sense of moral responsibility.<div><br /></div><div>Which brings me round to the argument that what may happen now doesn't really matter because Murdoch's real business and real wealth comes from the United States and other international markets, and the UK is small beer for him. While technically true, this doesn't really apply if you've lived your whole life in the UK and intend to stay here for some time to come; of necessity, your concerns will lean more towards his impact on the world you grew up in and felt had been snatched from you before you could fully inherit it. His impact on American television simply cannot be compared to his impact here; while Fox undoubtedly changed the <i>content </i>of US network TV, appealing to an audience that previously hadn't been recognised and willing that audience's cultural norms to become far broader (and thus, ironically, upsetting many of the viewers of the news network that uses the same name), it didn't bring about a comparable change in the <i>form</i>, which had always been structured on populist, market-led grounds virtually as a foundation stone of American broadcasting itself (which is precisely the reason why the pre-1990 ITV was set up as it was - or, more accurately, <i>wasn't</i>).</div><div><br /></div><div>The changes he brought about in Australia, where it all began for him, were possibly more profound, but replacing a cultural cringe towards one empire on the other side of the world with a cultural cringe towards another empire, also on the other side of the world, hardly compares with Murdoch's impact in Britain (and was already such an irresistible force in Australian society that someone else would undoubtedly have exploited it - as indeed a "someone else" as significant as Kerry Packer also did). Also, while the official, establishment culture of pre-Murdoch Britain obviously depended to some extent on the suppression of the working class, it does not compare with the absolute, over-riding racism which was the foundation stone of the nascent Australian state, and much of Australian society, at that time. It is worth noting at this point that even a soul act as mainstream and melodic as the Supremes only managed (I think) three Top 40 hits in Australia during the '60s: the first-gen Murdoch model of absorbing American pop culture in place of a dying imperial culture in fact retained <i>exactly </i>all the faults, down to and including the inveterate racism, of the culture it supposedly swept away, in exactly the same way that the Murdochisation of British culture would do in my own lifetime.</div><div><br /></div><div>We must not let the chance to build a better, more equable future for Britain slip away from us. We must keep up the pressure. We must see any reduction in Murdoch's power that may follow as the start, not the end. We must tell ourselves that the unfolding story vindicates every refusal we have ever made to conform to the ruling ideology of the day, just as much as 1989 vindicated every refusal the dissidents of Eastern Europe had ever made. But we must not become complacent. If things really do change for the better, we can tell ourselves with pride that we never gave up, just as much as Walesa and - in his own way, in his own context - Mandela could. But we have a long way to go yet. Let's seize the moment. <i>Let's push things forward.</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>(It has been pointed out elsewhere that I do not mention the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wapping_dispute">Wapping dispute</a> in this piece. That is merely a byproduct of the way I tend to come at these things - mainly because nobody else does - and not any kind of ignorance of the event's importance in modern British history, which is indeed immense, not least as the closest thing to the miners' strike that was ever experienced in London.)</div>Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-28790099196969191562011-07-05T14:27:00.000-07:002011-07-12T16:37:09.470-07:00Murdoch is everyone's problem and everyone's responsibility<div>Too much humbug at the moment. Too much "not us, guv". Yes, obviously what the <i>News of the World </i>did is almost unspeakably vile even by their standards, and anything that can be done to reduce NewsCorp's power and status within British life - however minor, however much rearranging the deckchairs - has to be some kind of positive gesture. But it all goes far deeper. Remember that he began to gain ground, even before Labour's fatal victory-by-default, because much of the British working class had got drunk on '60s pop culture and had decided that the <i>Daily Mirror </i>was therefore too redolent of the old ideas of betterment and self-improvement. Think of how often you've heard people pretend to hate Murdoch "and all he stands for" while gleefully celebrating and enthusing over forms of mass culture which have got where they are very largely through his promotion and exposure. Think of how often you've heard people parroting anti-Murdoch rhetoric because it's what people of their political side do, while simultaneously laughing at the idea of the autodidact and dismissing the very concept of learning for its own sake. And think on. Where the anti-Murdoch Murdochians are concerned - those who think Murdoch is simply one phenomenon in isolation, rather than part of a far deeper and more embedded problem - the final bars of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcJPnYASvBk">this song</a> have never seemed more relevant.</div>Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-17536285501558924672011-06-22T16:12:00.000-07:002011-06-22T21:26:36.928-07:00Festivals of Britain, and the luxury of metropolitan life<div>Looking around the commemorations for the 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain - and Current 93 were <i>awesome</i>, in the oldest sense of that term, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last Sunday; an extremity and totality that they've rarely approached on record since their earliest years - and reading the accompanying book is a strange experience for someone with my very specific cultural grounding and early experiences. Certainly, the celebrations remind me anew how far removed my first experiences of the Royal Festival Hall - the site of my childhood realisation of class awareness and the essential unfairness and inequality of British life that has been ever more entrenched since while posing as the opposite - were from the ideals of democratic art on which the venue was founded, and how lost they had become by then in the privileged talking to themselves. The whole centre has undoubtedly, in recent years, reanimated and reactivated the ethos on which the Festival of Britain was built for an almost unimaginably different age, and managed to make connections which would have been beyond lesser bodies (though the representation of hip-hop is sufficiently embalmed in the received version of the street culture of 20 years ago and more - now accepted, absorbed, <i>not a problem </i>- as to show what will probably always be beyond them).</div><div><br /></div><div>As is inevitable for any end-of-empire place and time, the 1950s in Britain saw three wildly oppositional visions of the cultural future presented to the mass. The decade began with the Festival of Britain, the product of the Attlee ethos of the best for the most and fair shares for all; this was rapidly supplanted by the Coronation, the last stand of the unreconstructed hierarchical culture of the British Empire (the Tories must have been secretly delighted that George VI died so soon after they got back; it gave them the platform to define an era which was both "new" and "a renaissance" yet wholly unencumbered with the troublesome socialism and inclusiveness of '51). By the decade's end, though, the middle-mass consumerism which has steadily gained more and more ground ever since had supplanted both visions; those who had tentatively, cautiously dipped their toes in post-war modernism in '51, and genuinely believed in '53 that a new age of autarky and supremacy was upon us, were lost in dreams of a "classless" America which were always as mythical and delusionary as quasi-feudal rural England - the true key years in post-war British history, the years Jake Thackray missed.</div><div><br />It is the great sadness of modern British life that it is '59 rather than '51 which proved the great long-term model on which British culture was rebuilt; those born long after even that fact who sing "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and "It's Raining Men" and "I've Had the Time of My Life" will know as little about '59 as about '51, but whereas the latter year has had no influence whatsoever on their life, their very existence, every breath they ever draw, is in the shadow of the former year and its irresistible (to those millions of expansionary citizens for whom '51 was simply the product of scarcity, of Labour thinking that telling them what to like would be a workable substitute for actually allowing the creation of wealth) combination of just the right amount of newness (of homes, cars, holidays) and a reassuring traditional sheen of certainty and stability - what the young Dennis Potter meant in the title of <i>The Glittering Coffin</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>The ideals and <i>forms </i>of art put forward in the Festival of Britain are, likewise, equally alien to <i>both </i>visions - the temporary, unsustainable reassertion of one empire, and the ambiguous, multi-layered comment on/celebration of another that came with Richard Hamilton - that followed. There are multiple - and, I am sure, conscious and thought-out - ironies in the fact that Saint Etienne's film of the RFH's rebirth is called <i>This is Tomorrow</i>; the 1956 exhibition of that name, as great a cultural earthquake as "Heartbreak Hotel", represented as instant and dramatic a challenge to the ideals of improvement - of public modernism rooted in history - contained within the Festival of five years earlier as it did to the blatant denial of the tide of history embodied in the art of the Coronation. Twenty years later, the phrase was used as the title of a song by Bryan Ferry, whose life shows precisely the flaws of Pop Art's wariness of left-wing commitment and clarity of political position; how easily its apolitical stance can mutate, especially since the traditional establishment's abandonment during the 1980s of any residual ties to non-commercial values, into a reconstruction, a refurbishment of conservatism. A further thirty years on, it set the context for a moment of reconciliation; an awareness that, if the South Bank Centre did not recognise the questions asked and the certainties exploded by Hamilton's legacy, it would eventually die a slow death, and that these could, after all, meet the legacy of '51 somewhere in the middle.</div><div><br /></div><div>It is of course almost universally recognised outside the most ideological right-wing circles that it made no economic sense - in fact, the precise opposite - for Britain for virtually all traces of the main Festival site, other than the RFH itself, to be destroyed so soon after the fact, just as it also made no economic sense for Britain for its entire heavy-industrial base to be destroyed and for the Film Council to be broken up almost overnight. In all those cases, the ideological fanaticism of the Tories, even the ones who at least accepted a certain amount of nationalisation, actually overpowered and discounted their supposed economic acumen, as it has frequently done throughout the party's history. This is why the legacy of the Festival of Britain is specifically potent in <i>this </i>place and time; it reminds us that, untenable as <i>that </i>precise top-down model is today, the state <i>does </i>have a role to play in ensuring true diversity where the market cannot, and that socialists can take from the best of the past to fight for a fairer future without being Blue Labourites (who are, if anything, the heirs - to invoke one of David Lindsay's favourite words, appropriate for someone who thinks the British aristocracy are more socialist than Sly and the Family Stone were - of those in 1951 who'd have said that the Festival was too metropolitan, too arty, too much Not For People Like Us).</div><div><br /></div><div>This is where I must, sadly, point out that the celebratory language in the Festival of Britain book about how modern Britain takes from multiple sources, hybridises them and creates something wholly new and uniquely of itself, while undoubtedly generally true in the world the London arts elite move within and even more true (all the more so for being outside official bounds) within the endlessly evolving working-class culture of that city, does not apply to the mass of the population outside the major cities, and assumes a far wider and broader range of experiences and influences, and a far more creative and proactive (and less purely reactive) use of these influences than millions of people, alas, ever make. Within the world I mix in from day to day - the world of the stables and the unconscious alliance of two classes' worst and most inhuman tendencies so horribly manifested at Ascot last week - the exchange of cultures and the use of those multiple influences to create something new simply does not exist. Only one culture beyond the lumpenprole or petit-bourgeois ones (delete as applicable) of this country is commonly known about at all in places such as I live in, and engagement with it is purely on the grounds of barely-altered, uncritical copying rather than the use of it to create something genuinely questioning and challenging.</div><div><br /></div><div>In short, Portland - and everywhere else like it - has everything in common, in its engagement with American-led mass culture, with the line that runs from Marty Wilde to N-Dubz, and nothing in common with the truly progressive line from Lonnie Donegan to Trilla. Other cultures do not exist at all for the vast majority of people here. This is the unfortunate reality that lurks beyond the knowledge of those who have the privilege to live beyond it. The reference in the Festival of Britain book to "the immigrant becoming the indigenous" is undoubtedly a truly wonderful thing when it is manifested in the lineage that produced grime and dubstep, but when it takes the form of the children of people who lived through the miners' strike in South Wales who know nothing beyond Cowellism - and if you are going to deal with the <i>whole </i>of this country, which after all was an extremely important aim of '51, you are going to have to - is it really any kind of improvement on what went before? Similarly, does the poppiest offspring of the London lineage - the Tinchys and Tinies - really represent any kind of broadening of the scope of the lives of lifelong<i> Sun </i>readers' children?</div><div><br /></div><div>A reference is made to the range of cultures brought through migration since 1951 having provided a counterbalance to "the insularity of Middle England". But the problem of a place like Portland is not so much insularity in the traditional sense - it has little connection to or awareness of its pre-pop history and ways - as an overt concentration on one particular foreign culture, gazed up at and absorbed on a completely one-way, apolitical, unthinking level. It <i>is </i>a narrowness, but a different kind of narrowness, and while the word may still apply in terms of the fear of "outsiders" that remains an active social force, to use the word "insularity" without further embellishment of what is meant suggests that the problems are essentially the same as those the regional tours of post-war modernist art attempted to rectify in 1951, rather than different problems created and defined by different people. If the specific language used in the book had been wholly correct, then the radio station that promotes itself with the irrelevant old piece of cloth that is the Dorset flag (whose use seems to increase in inverse proportions to its cultural meaning - it's another example of Ploughman's Lunchism; hardly anyone round here less than a decade ago had the slightest idea what it looked like, and its sudden promotion is merely gaping over the cracks, rather than meaningfully filling any kind of hole in anyone's life) would be playing the songs you'd have heard 60 years ago on <i>Singing Together</i>, rather than Maroon 5 and Bruno Mars and that 1981 song whose recent promotion in the UK is as dangerous, and as politicised, an act of pseudo-history as anything propagated under Stalin. No doubt this sounds overtly pedantic on my part, but if you're concerned with the <i>specific </i>problems of a particular place, the language does have to be just right for the purpose and meaning involved. However narrow people's existence may be, "insularity" is not quite the right term when something from outside is <i>more </i>real to them than something native; just not the right things from outside, and not viewed or related to in the right way.</div><div><br /></div><div>Heritage kitsch is merely a meaningless sideshow whose very prevalence shows up how hollow and empty it is (if it <i>did </i>have a genuine meaning and wasn't just as much a marketing game as anything in the pop industry itself, the places would probably be far more culturally open and tolerant than they are; just compare the general <i>Guardian </i>values of followers of folk music with the petty-minded racism of most old rockers; also, to a considerable extent, compare Scotland). The real problems the non-metropolitan areas face are different, and require different responses. Most of the real creativity in Britain <i>does </i>come from the metropolitan areas; the widespread, long-term British left view that the working class of the English shires is at least as counter-revolutionary by its very nature, and riddled with class treason <i>as an essential element of belonging</i>, as the Protestant working class in Northern Ireland was seen as in the Marxist analysis of the Troubles, <i>does </i>have a great deal of truth to it. I've lived round here long enough, and know the place well enough, to admit that now.</div><div><br /></div><div>Nonetheless, if you can make it, spend some time around the South Bank for the remainder of the summer, and consider what happened, and what didn't happen, and what still could. You may know yourself, and wherever you live, far better for the experience.</div>Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6912742963368399051.post-10204769941682204722011-06-22T14:49:00.000-07:002011-06-22T19:24:49.069-07:00English football: a final wordTell many - I fear, most - English football fans that you like even one film by Godard or Antonioni and you're "not one of them"; you've let the side down; you cannot be a "real" football fan and any claim you may make to love the game is fake, bogus, mythical. Refer to "Camp Nou" and you hate the game that is played better there than anywhere else in the world (I'd love to believe that nobody has ever told me this, but they have). The best part of two decades since the "New Football Writing" and its related myths were presented as having put an end to that bull-headed ignorance, it is as embedded as ever in the existence of the game's middle mass; strengthened, not undermined in any way, by the specific economic forces which appear on a superficial level to have changed the demographic basis and the origins and backgrounds of participants in the English game.<div><br /></div><div>But what English football culture believes <i>does </i>fit in with a love of the game is just as telling as what it believes <i>doesn't</i>. Godard and Antonioni came from countries which have both won the World Cup in the last 15 years, and which contested the 2006 final. But while a love of their films - or anything else (don't come the "Club Can't Handle Me" with me, now; you <i>know </i>that doesn't count and you're just being pedantic to avoid the point) that originated from any other country outside England where football is the unrivalled top sport and a fundamental, overriding passion for millions - is seen as alien and unfitting to a love of football, an absolute and uncritical absorption by one country, and to a much lesser extent three other minor-functionary footman nations, where football has (at least until very recently) barely registered at all, is seen as entirely natural and entirely appropriate to a love of the game - in fact, <i>more </i>appropriate than a love of anything that existed even in <i>this </i>country pre-Murdoch. English football, like no other major sporting enthusiasm anywhere in the world, is bound up with an adoring worship of those parts of the world where the sport plays at best a minor role, and a sneering dismissal of anything whatsoever that originates in those parts of the world where the sport enjoys equal or greater popularity to that it enjoys here.</div><div><br /></div><div>There is a direct connection between this unfortunate fact and the dismal performances of the England senior side against Switzerland (incidentally, isn't Bombardier beer - advertised as always before the game - an extreme example of Ploughman's Lunch syndrome? I had never heard of it before about 2005) and of the England Under-21 side in Denmark. The non-football world is more real to the players and especially to Stuart Pearce (repeat unto infinity if you're still stuck in 1987: the Lurkers were worse than George Benson) even than their own country; the football world is fake, Not Like Us, an unknowable phantom. They've never listened to Spanish, Ukrainian or Czech music or watched a Spanish, Ukrainian or Czech film; ergo those countries have nothing to teach them about football.<i> They might as well not exist</i>. That is why English football, <i>worsened </i>in this respect by Sky, is still every bit as removed in the way it is played and the values it incarnates from the rest of the football world as it was before 1992. That is also the root cause of the FIFA standoff (yes, I know capitalist greed is capitalist greed wherever it happens and isn't any better just because it isn't the work of Anglo-Saxons, yes I know the FIFA elite represents the capitalist greed of several "races" just as much as the NewsCorp elite represents the capitalist greed of another "race", but there is something peculiarly odious about one "race" of greedy capitalists attacking other greedy capitalists for being the wrong "race" of greedy capitalists while pretending to attack them simply for being greedy capitalists full stop).</div><div><br /></div><div>If you have a sport whose entire culture is rooted in hatred for all the other countries that can teach it anything about that sport, and genuflection towards one country and its three footmen (who used to be our own footmen and are still ludicrously imagined to be so when it suits us) that can teach us nothing at all about it, you'll get English football. You'll get Stuart Pearce, the BNP lookalike with his good honest bone-crunching roast beef tackles sending people who listened mostly to the same music as the England players of the day, and ate the same food, and drank the same drinks, but did often have far more left-wing political views, back to their opera houses and onions and cognac and invading Poland. I hope you're all very proud of yourselves. Personally, I rather wish you'd all stuck with the NFL you were all watching instead when "Livin' on a Prayer" came out and had led our own football shrivel to crowds of 240 at Blyth Spartans and Rooney was the first European captain at the Superbowl in 2015. At least that would have shown where you belong. At least that would have been honest.</div><div><br /></div><div>English football has dressed itself up as having escaped a world of insularity and xenophobia. The Under-21 side reveals this as the biggest lie of the last 20 years. We've swapped honest xenophobia - however odious it was, '70s blokishness <i>never pretended to be anything else </i>- for something which pretends to be "global" while actually being so only in the sense that the "Sweat" remix is. Let those words lie on Pearce's grave, after Montenegro have won Euro 2016.</div>Robin Carmodyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com0